Elon Musk’s platform, X, which used to be known as Twitter, has started charging prospective customers in the countries of New Zealand as well as the Philippines a fee of US$1 annually as part of a subscription trial that the platform claims is intended to combat bots.
The subscription service, which costs $1 USD a year to access essential features like liking, retweeting, tweeting, and answering, was first revealed by Fortune. Following Fortune’s report, X made the information public.
The corporation said in a post that it has begun testing “Not A Bot,” a new membership option for new customers in two countries, as of October 17th, 2023. “We created this new test to complement our substantial efforts to lower spam.
This will assess a possibly effective solution to assist us in fighting bots and spammer on X, all the while balancing the small price amount with platform accessibility. There is no impact on current users during this test.
You will need to first validate your phone number on newly created accounts in the Philippines and New Zealand before you may post, like, comment, repost, quote, and bookmark anything. The annual price is US$1.
In the post, X stated, “New users who choose not to subscribe will only be able to take’read only’ actions, such as: reading posts, watching videos, and follow accounts.”
The amount is about equivalent to 42.51 Philippine pesos and NZ$1.43.
“The goal of this new software is to protect the platform from bots and spammers that try to take advantage of it and interfere with other X users’ experiences. We’re excited to discuss the results in further detail shortly,” the article stated.
According to the terms and regulations, users whoever sign up for the new fee must accept a regular membership payment and understand that it is a beta program.
Although the present proposal is limited to new customers, Musk initially brought up the possibility of charging all users last month during a chat with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
He explained that the reasoning was because setting up a bot costs “a fraction of a penny,” therefore increasing the cost of an account.