New X users face fee: Payment should help against bots

Even before the take-over of Twitter for a whopping $44 billion, Elon Musk had complained about the omnipresence of bots on the platform. And the claim was certainly not completely unsubstantiated. Most social networks have to contend with automated likes and posts that are duplicated hundreds of times, artificially inflated traffic figures and astonishingly clever bots.

Previous attempts to recognize these remote-controlled user profiles and the networks behind them and thus limit their impact have apparently had little success. In addition, AI-generated content on X is now said to be able to undermine all automatic methods of detection.

Accordingly, a new method is now to come into play. Elon Musk writes of a "small fee for new user write access" that is unavoidable in order to fend off the "relentless onslaught" of bots.

It is not known how high this will be. However, there have already been corresponding test runs in 2023, including in New Zealand and the Philippines. Only after paying an annual fee of 1 dollar was it possible to publish content yourself or respond to other content after registering.

Reading the news, on the other hand, was not affected. There are also plans to refund the money after a certain period of time.

In general, the procedure is unlikely to lead to any additional revenue. There are fears that fraudsters are making payments using forged or stolen credit card details. Their detection and the subsequent refunds are likely to lead to enormous additional costs.

It will be interesting to see how this development, which is by no means exclusive to X, continues.