Elon Musk has been making drastic changes to X (formerly Twitter) since he took over the service last year. After the introduction of X Blue premium membership, it looks like Musk is planning to make X a subscription only service.
Elon Musk recently sat down for a discussion with the Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu (via Deadline) where he suggested making every user pay a small monthly fee to use X. He further said that this is still in discussion so there is no word on when he plans to roll out the subscription only model.
Musk also noted that the subscription will cost less that X Blue membership that is currently offered as a perk to users and comes with additional features as well as a verified checkmark.
We’re wanting it to be just a small amount of money. It’s a longer discussion, but in my view this is the only defense against vast armies of bots, because as AI gets very, very good, it’s actually able to pass these sort of CAPTCHA tests better than humans.
Musk believes that subscription only model will remove bots from the platform as AI is getting smart enough to be able to pass CAPTCHA tests. In the same discussion, Musk also addressed the free speech issue that has been a cause for concern lately on the platform.
free speech at times means that somebody you don’t like is saying something you don’t like. If you don’t have that, then it’s not free speech. That doesn’t mean some sort of negativity should be pushed upon people, because for the X platform, unless it is interesting, entertaining, engaging, then we will lose users. People will not want to use our system if they find it to be unpleasant.
Musk has been working hard to navigate through the various issues surrounding X since the acquisition late last year. With the company facing lawsuits from former employees, advertisers leaving the platform, a security breach that allowed everyone to see Twitter Circle tweets, and multiple outages, it has been a rocky ride for Musk"s latest experiment.