The rule, which was previously active in New Zealand and the Philippines, was originally intended to filter out new spam accounts, but now greed may be playing a role, even if it’s not a significant amount of money per user.

Musk, the owner of Twitter, is about to hit the figurative nuclear button by changing the rules of the social platform so that new users will have to pay a figurative amount per year to reply, like or bookmark a tweet. The rule requiring a confirmed phone number to subscribe has been removed.

SPECULATION: X might be expanding its policy to charge new users before they reply/like/bookmark a post https://t.co/odqeyeiHBx pic.twitter.com/EU71qlwQ0D

— X Daily News (@xDaily) April 15, 2024

Musk confirmed this in a tweet. Unfortunately, according to him, the write permission granted to new users is necessary for Twitter to beat back the relentless bot attack, as current AI and troll farms can easily pass the “Are you a bot?” challenge. (The great irony here is that Musk bought a lot of Nvidia GPUs to help his xAI startup work on the new version of its AI, Grok…)

Unfortunately, a small fee for new user write access is the only way to curb the relentless onslaught of bots.

Current AI (and troll farms) can pass “are you a bot” with ease.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 15, 2024

The whole thing could backfire in a way that Musk might scare new users away from the platform, because if they see that they have to pay for basic features (probably a token amount, not several dollars a month), they might think they can do it elsewhere for free, and go to Twitter rival Threads, for example, which Meta and its leader Mark Zuckerberg don’t talk about much these days.

The goal is to make more money and reduce the number of bots. Recently, Twitter’s revenue has been declining, and in recent months the site launched an ad revenue sharing program for content creators. Twitter is also allowing longer video uploads and has struck deals with some celebrities (Tucker Carlson, Don Lemon) to publish their shows on the platform. Longer video uploads require a subscription to the former Twitter Blue, now called Premium.

According to Bloomberg, Twitter generated $2.5 billion in cash flow last year, about $600 million per quarter, down from $1 billion before Musk. As a result, Fidelity has cut the market value of its stake in the site by 70%. Musk also wants a job portal and payment system on Twitter. Somewhat ambitious.

Source: WCCFTech