Last month, Elon Musk hinted that X, formerly known as Twitter, could start charging a small amount of fee to all users on the platform to reduce the number of fake accounts and posts on the social media service. Well, X has now finally made an announcement about it.
X has introduced a new subscription called ‘Not A Bot’ in New Zealand and the Philippines and it costs $1/year. All the new accounts on the platform, which are unverified, will have to subscribe to this plan to publish a post, like a post, reply to a post, repost, quote a post, and bookmark a post. If people with new, unverified accounts choose not to pay, they will be able to only read posts, watch videos, and follow accounts on the social media platform.
According to the company, the Not A Bot program is currently in the testing phase. X also says “Within this test, existing users are not affected”. It means that if your account on X is old and/or verified, you will not be affected by the latest move (you will not have to pay for the new subscription). It is also worth mentioning that people creating new accounts on the platform will now have to authenticate their identity by verifying their phone number.
X says that this subscription is not a profit driver
On the support page for the Not A Bot subscription, X says “This new test was developed to bolster our already significant efforts to reduce spam, manipulation of our platform and bot activity. 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”. In a post on X, the company adds that the new subscription is “not a profit driver”.
The Not A Bot subscription is available alongside the X Premium membership, which costs $8/month if purchased on the web and $11/month if purchased from the Apple App Store. This subscription comes with a lot more benefits compared to the cheaper option, including the ability to edit a post, format text while making a post, and make longer posts.
Author’s Note: Going by X's statements and goals, the company might soon introduce the Not A Bot subscription in other regions around the globe. That means you might soon have to start paying a small amount of fee to publish posts or interact with posts on the social media platform even if you are not in New Zealand or the Philipines. The latest move could push people away from X and towards Threads which is a direct rival to Twitter from Meta.
