X, formerly Twitter, users face paying as Elon Musk takes on ‘bot armies’

Elon Musk is working on introducing a paywall on X to combat the problem of bots.

Elon Musk departs following a meeting in the office of US House Speaker Kevin McCarthy on September 13. Picture: AFP

Elon Musk is working on introducing a paywall on Twitter/X to combat the problem of bots.

The owner of the social media network revealed the move during a meeting with Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, that was broadcast on the platform.

“The single most important reason that we’re moving to having a small, monthly payment for use of X is it’s the only way I can think of to combat vast armies of bots,” Musk said.

Harun Ozalp/Anadolu Agency via Getty He said it would be the only defence against “vast armies of bots”

The billionaire has focused on the issue of bot accounts since he bought Twitter/X. They are held responsible for spam, disinformation and hate speech and were one of the reasons he created X Premium, a paid-for service that costs $220 a year.

Now Musk has said that all users may have to pay a fee as it would force bot creators to use a different payment method every time they wanted to set up a new account. He added that AI had made it easier for bot creators to evade human authentication tests, called Captcha. He provided no other details on the move.

The platform has suffered a drop in revenue, with a forecast of $US3 billion for 2023, down from $US4.4 billion last year. Much of the fall is attributed to the exodus of US advertisers, which Musk has said is the cause of advertising revenue dropping 60 per cent in the region.

The Twitter/X chief has blamed campaigns from organisations such as the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the Center for Countering Digital Hate, which have highlighted what they believe to be an increase in hate speech on the platform since Musk took over.

Their research has been supported by a study from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue in March that found antisemitic posts rose by more than 100 per cent in the months after Musk bought Twitter/X last October. The platform has reinstated the accounts of far-right activists as it pursues a policy that allows more extreme views but does not seek to promote them.

Netanyahu urged Musk to do more to combat antisemitism as he visited the Tesla factory in California. “I hope you can find, within the confines of the First Amendment, the ability to not only stop antisemitism as best you can but any collective hatred of the people that antisemitism represents,” he said.

Musk said he was against antisemitism but has threatened legal action against the ADL. He said that with 100 to 200 million posts on Twitter/X a day, “some of those are going to be bad”. In May Israel criticised Musk for stoking antisemitism by attacking George Soros, the Jewish businessman who has been the subject of conspiracy theories.

Musk renewed that attack with a tweet on Sunday that Soros’s organisation “appears to want nothing less than the destruction of western civilization”. Soros, 93, has donated billions of dollars of his personal wealth to liberal and anti-authoritarian causes.

The Times