Tech billionaire X/Twitter owner Elon Musk is contemplating putting the micro-blogging social media site behind a paywall, as he attempts to “battle the bots”.
Since buying the company for an eye-watering £40billion in 2022, Musk has changed almost every aspect of the site, from its name to its logo. And he also introduced a paid-for verification scheme.
However, it now appears that this is not enough for him, as he has openly admitted that the site could go behind a paywall for every single user. During a chat about technology with Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, he said: “We're moving to having a small monthly payment for use of the system.
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“A bot costs a fraction of a penny, but if somebody even has to pay a few dollars or something, some minor amount, the effective cost to bots is very high. We're actually going to come up with a lower tier pricing. So we just want it to be just a small amount of money.
“This is a longer discussion, but in my view, this is actually the only defence against vast armies of bots.”
The comments are in direct contradiction to a tweet made in May, 2022, where he said that “Twitter will always be free for casual users, but maybe a slight cost for commercial/government users.”. And Musk has been slammed for the idea, with many users pointing out that it will end up driving many of those using the site away.
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One wrote: “A site that relies on selling advertising to reach engaged users implementing a policy to drive away all the most interesting users – they don't call him a business genius for nothing!”
And a second commented: “Battle against bots? He laid off support staff, stopped banning accounts and wants to stop the ability to block people.
“He is basically the king of the bots.”
A third posted: “Will be the end of its ambition of becoming a global 'public square'. I doubt he's thought this through.”
The Daily Star has approached Twitter/X for a comment . . . despite the press office email auto-responding with a smiling pile of poo emoji.
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