As of yesterday (Oct. 17), new, unverified accounts in New Zealand and the Philippines are required to sign up for a $1 annual subscription to be able to post and interact with other posts on X, according to the site’s Support page.
“This new test was developed to bolster our already successful efforts to reduce spam, manipulation of our platform and bot activity, while balancing platform accessibility with the small fee amount. It is not a profit driver,” the company said in its Oct. 17 blogpost, published hours after the magazine Fortune had broken the story.
New users who opt out of subscribing will be restricted to “read only” actions: read posts, watch videos, and follow accounts. For anything more—posting, retweeting, quote tweeting, replying, bookmarking, etc.—they have to choose between one of three plans: the $1 fee, the X Premium plan (roughly $11 for iOS and Android and $8 for web users), which gives users access to editing and undo-ing tweets, or the $1,000 per month Verified Organizations plan.
Quotable: Musk’s plan to stop the bots
“Read for free, but $1/year to write. It’s the only way to fight bots without blocking real users. This won’t stop bots completely, but it will be 1000X harder to manipulate the platform.”
How will X’s $1 subscription stop bots?
In September, Musk floated the idea of charging all users a nominal fee during a conversation with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
At the time, Musk justified the move by saying that bots cost “a fraction of a penny” to set up and raising the cost of an account to “a few dollars or something” could put off operators of the software, the Guardian reported. “Plus, every time a bot creator wanted to make another bot, they would need another new payment method,” Musk added.
But on the flip side, it could become a barrier for humans, too. The fee, however small, could alienate several populations like young people and those who don’t have a bank account.
Is the $1 X subscription really about bots?
Some think charging individual human accounts is less to do with curbing bot activity on the microblogging platform (several bots already pay for verification badges) and more to do gathering fodder for Musk’s “everything app” ambitions.
One user floated that its a guise to gather credit card credentials—information that the company could presumably leverage for financial services and e-commerce offerings at a later date, another pointed out. Yet another chimed in to claim that Musk can’t be trusted to store credit card information safely. A recent report did flag one of of Musk’s other companies, Tesla, for data privacy concerns.
One more thing: X needs a “profit driver”
X, formerly Twitter, isn’t faring too well: It’s been struggling to keep user count and engagement from falling. And it needs to make up for its plunging ad revenue, pay off its $13 billion debt, and foot any unpaid bills.
But the future is bright, CEO Linda Yaccarino said in an interview last month, pegging 2024 as the year that X turns profitable. She said ad revenue is already ticking up and other cost-cutting measures (read: layoffs on layoffs) are paying off.