Elon Musk Wants to Charge Twitter/X Users $1 per Year to Fix its Bot Problem
Quartz - Ever since Elon Musk purchased Twitter/X back in 2022, the idea of charging users to use the platform has come up multiple times.
The company implemented a charge of one dollar per year for new users in New Zealand and the Philippines back in October 2023. On April 15, 2024, a change to the website’s policy gained traction on the platform due to speculation that Twitter/X may be expanding the $1 a year cost to more countries.
If you're an active, Twitter/X user, then you've seen that amount of bots who have overtaken the app have made it virtually unusable. You can't escape them. I suppose, "unusable" is a bit extreme, but their presence is at minimum unavoidable. Look in the replies of any tweet from @BarstoolSports and you'll see one of 3 different bots (there's way more than 3 types of bots but these are the one's I encounter the most.
There's the gambling picks bot. Pretty much any tweet I've made in the last year that's at least sports adjacent is bombarded by bots trying to hawk me picks. I'd throw in an example for you but I don't want to give them publicity.
Then there's the bots that just give really short, generic replies that could apply to anything. For some reason I picture all of these replies coming from a man in India who doesn't fully understand the English language/how Twitter works. But I don't think they're written by a man in India at all. Pretty sure they're just bots from India.
And of course there's the incessant "Tits in Bio", porn bots. I look at their bio's every time. Just to make sure the bots are being honest.
Idk where all these bots came from, or why as soon as Elon Musk took over the company the bots decided to multiply exponentially. But they've officially turned into a problem. The whole website is a problem in itself. But the copious amounts of bots is one of the more glaring ones.
Luckily our fearless leader Elon Musk has a solution. His solution: Give him money. There's nothing money can't fix. The bot accounts are a problem, and apparently the only way to combat the onslaught of bots is to charge new users a one-time fee of $1.
Apparently charging new users $1 is the only way to get rid of the bots. It doesn't sound like this is even about making money. But apparently the process of entering in your credit card information and paying $1 will somehow weed out all these AI troll farm bots (or whatever they're called). I can't help but think that the bot people will quickly learn a way around this. I feel like they could probably train whatever AI their using to pay a $1 one-time. But if it actually does get rid of, or at least slow down the number of bots, I'll take it. As long as it's only affecting new users, and I don't have to pay Twitter any more than I'm already paying for my blue checkmark, then this doesn't concern me what so ever. Great idea Elon. Keep up the below average work.