On Monday (September 18) local time, Musk said that his social media platform X (formerly Twitter) may soon charge all users, a move aimed at combating the large number of "bots" existing on the X platform. Musk met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Northern California on Monday, and the two had a wide-ranging conversation about artificial intelligence that was live-streamed on X.
When asked how to prevent "bots" from spreading a lot of hate speech on the X platform, Musk replied that X is considering requiring all users to pay a small fee to solve this problem.
Musk said that charging all users is the only way he can think of to fight the "robot army". He explained that the current operating cost of a "robot" account on X is very low, maybe only 0.1 cents, but if it has to pay a few dollars or some small fee, its operating cost will become very high.
Musk did not mention how much users would be charged or when the new charging system would begin. "We're actually going to come up with a lower tier of pricing, so we're hoping it's a small amount of money," he said. "That's a longer discussion, but in my opinion, that's really the only way to defend against a massive horde of robots."
This isn’t the first time Musk has considered charging all X users. According to media reports, Musk discussed the idea with one of his advisers, venture capitalist David Sacks, last year.
Since acquiring Twitter last October, Musk has made a series of reforms to the platform, including a paid verification service. Organizational accounts, including businesses, non-profit organizations and government agencies, need to pay US$1,000 per month to obtain Blue Label certification, while individual accounts need to pay US$8 per month, otherwise the certification mark will be revoked.
Although Musk claimed that charging all X users was to deal with "robots", some analysts said that he was trying to increase revenue for X.
In July of this year, Musk posted on X that the company was in a difficult financial situation. "With ad revenue down 50% and a heavy debt load, we remain cash flow negative. We need to be cash flow positive to have the luxury of anything else," he said at the time.
The risk is that if Musk charges all X users, the platform could lose a large number of users. That could make X even less attractive to advertisers, which still make up the majority of the company's revenue.