In the latest installment of Elon Musk’s drive to rid his platform of bots, the quirky billionaire is testing a $1/year subscription plan for unverified accounts.
The program, dubbed “Not a Bot,” is Musk’s attempt at reducing the number of bots on X (formerly Twitter). However, the subscription plan is only being tested in New Zealand and the Philippines and will only apply to new X accounts for now.
The theory is bot accounts won’t pay the subscription fee.
Users who don’t sign up for the subscription plan can use X in read-only mode, meaning those users cannot post or interact with other X accounts. They can only read posts and follow other accounts on the platform.
Musk hopes this reduces the number of bots who post automatic replies to larger accounts, often advertising crypto scams.
Of course, this won’t completely eliminate bot accounts. Nefarious users could easily set up a bot account on X, pay the nominal $1 annual fee, and then turn the account into a bot.
Eventually, Musk wants to roll the annual subscription plan out to all of Twitter.
Twitter already introduced the X Premium (formerly Twitter Blue) service, where users pay around $8/month for access to features like fewer ads, boosted comments, and a small share of the ad revenue that X generates.
The revenue share is more than enough to pay for many users’ Premium subscriptions.
