Elon Musk plans to charge new X users a small fee to enable publishing on the social network and reduce the bot problem.
In response to an X account that posted about the changes on the X website, Musk said that charging a small fee to new accounts is “the only way” to stop the “bot attack.”
“Current AI (and troll farms) can easily pass the 'Are you a robot' question,” Musk said, referring to tools like CAPTCHA.
While responding to another user, Musk later added that new accounts will be able to post three months after they are created without paying fees.
As is the case with many announcements related to the social platform, there are no details at the moment about when this policy will be implemented and what fees new users may have to pay.
Last October, X began charging new, unverified users $1 per year in New Zealand and the Philippines. New users registered to the platform from these areas can read posts but cannot interact with them. To post content, such as, repost, reply, bookmark and quote, they had to pay a fee. Musk may apply similar fees for other regions.
Earlier this month, X said the platform had begun a major purge of spam accounts, warning users that their follower counts could be affected. However, with a plan to charge new users, the social media company appears to be aiming to better address the bot problem.
While Musk has talked about fighting AI bots, last year, X updated its policy to include a provision that public posts can be used to train machine learning algorithms or AI models. Separately, in July 2023, Musk said his artificial intelligence company xAI would use public posts to train models.
Earlier this month, xAI made its Grok chatbot available to premium X users, who pay $8 per month. The chatbot was previously available to users who paid $16 per month for the Premium+ tier. Last week, Fortune reported that X plans to make Grok available for users to create posts.
