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Elon Musk reportedly says the social network X (formerly Twitter) is moving to charge all its users.
The Billionaire said this latest move is in order to combat “vast armies of bots” He did not say how much a new plan would cost users of the social network, or what other features would or would not be included with payment at the lowest tier.
In a Twitter thread on Monday, according to Bloomberg’s Dave Lee, the idea of introducing a general paywall to all users of the social platform has been toyed around with internally since his takeover last year.
The US tech columnist was commenting on utterances made by the Testla boss while speaking with Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Open AI co-founder Greg Brockman, and MIT Professor Max Tegmark during a recent Artificial Intelligence (AI) round table talk.
Lee also attached a link to a 2022 article that spoke about the proposed blanket charge in his thread.
Currently, only users of its subscriber-based service, “Twitter Blue,” pay to access additional benefits of using the platform, such as the once-coveted blue check, the use of more characters, etc.
Musk’s decision to introduce a fee to retain key features of the site in 2022 was met with strong pushback, leading to a steep decline in users. The move also saw the emergence of a handful of free alternatives, such as “Bluesky” and, more recently, Meta’s “Threads.”
Neither Twitter nor Musk have officially commented on the report.
