Elon Musk To Charge New Users A Fee For Basic Account On X

Tesla CEO and X owner Elon Musk might roll out a fee for new users to use X's (formerly Twitter) basic features.

The social media platform has already begun charging new users in New Zealand and the Philippines, and the same might be implemented in other countries as well. They are being charged about $0.75 and $0.85, respectively, each year to be able to upload content on X. People who opt out of paying will only be able to read posts and watch videos.

"This will evaluate a potentially powerful measure to help us combat bots and spammers on X while balancing platform accessibility with the small fee amount," the company said in a statement. However, people who have already been using X will not have to pay any charges.

The social media giant has been undergoing a radical overhaul since Elon Musk purchased it last year. From temporarily restricting the number of tweets users can read in a day to introducing a paid verification service, Musk has made several major changes to the platform.

X recently removed headlines displayed alongside links to articles. This change allowed users to see only the posters' take on content. Musk's changes at X are aimed at increasing profit or improving statistics.

Managing Twitter is proving to be a tough nut to crack for Elon Musk. He has been changing Twitter policies and implementing new strategies every week. Musk recently said that he has been trying to sell the microblogging site after acquiring it for $44 billion (about £34,884,642,829).

X has been under criticism for allowing hate speech, disinformation, and spam to run rampant on the social media platform after Musk's acquisition. According to the EU (European Union), X has the highest ratio of disinformation among popular social media platforms.

Earlier this year, an analysis conducted by tech firm CASM Technology and the Institute for Strategic Dialogue revealed that antisemitic tweets have more than doubled since Elon Musk took over Twitter last year.

The researchers analysed over a million tweets with the help of various tech tools for "plausibly antisemitic" tweets between June 2022 and February 2023. The findings, which have not been peer-reviewed, revealed that there was a 105 per cent increase in the number of such tweets from October 27 to February 9, 2023.

An analysis by the Network Contagion Research Institute found that the use of the N-word on Twitter, a racist term used against black people, increased by almost 500 per cent after Elon Musk's acquisition of the platform. It found that most of the tweets using the N-word were from anonymous trolls.