Following the announcement in April this year of charging for blue label certification services, social platform X (formerly Twitter) may charge users a small monthly fee. On September 18, local time, in a live broadcast event, Twitter boss and Tesla CEO Elon Musk was asked how to prevent the "army of robots" from amplifying hate speech on the X platform. He said that this is a super difficult problem, and for this purpose, the platform will require users to pay a small monthly fee.
Musk said that currently, the X platform provides free and paid services. Under such a system, the operating cost of the robot is very low, "only a fraction of a penny." If someone pays a few dollars to use the service, the "effective cost of the robot" becomes very high.
Musk also mentioned at the event that there are 100 million to 200 million posts in the X platform system every day, which is difficult to "supervise in advance", but measures can be taken to "reduce the scale."
Musk did not mention when or how much he would start charging users. In April this year, Twitter announced that it would cancel the free certification mark with immediate effect. Organizational accounts, including businesses, non-profit organizations, and government agencies, will need to pay US$1,000 per month to obtain blue label certification, and personal accounts will need to pay US$8 per month, otherwise the certification mark will be revoked. This news caused dissatisfaction among many Twitter corporate users.
It is worth mentioning that on July 15, local time, Musk mentioned on the X platform that due to an approximately 50% drop in advertising revenue and a heavy debt burden, Twitter's cash flow is still negative. He also said that Twitter’s advertising revenue growth in June did not meet expectations, and the situation in July was relatively optimistic.
At the end of July this year, Twitter’s blue bird logo was replaced with an “X” and its website address was immediately changed to x.com. “We are about to say goodbye to Twitter and all birds,” Musk wrote on Twitter at the time.
This is not the first time that Musk has proposed charging fees on Twitter. As early as April, Musk said that media organizations would be allowed to charge users for browsing single articles, and believed that this was a win-win initiative, but it ended up being nothing.
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