New Delhi: The social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, will not be free anymore, as Elon Musk is planning to charge a “small monthly payment’ from users.
In a live-streamed interaction with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Musk floated the idea that the social network may no longer be a free site, in a bid to deal with the problem of bots on the platform.
“It’s the only way I can think of to combat vast armies of bots,” Musk said late on Monday.
“Because a bot costs a fraction of a penny -- call it a tenth of a penny -- but even if it has to pay a few dollars or something, the effective cost of bots is very high,” the billionaire added.
The idea of charging everyone on X is not a new idea as last year, Musk had floated it for the first time.
The company currently charges $8 per month from its X Premium users, that gives them an ability to edit posts, see less ads, write longer posts and prioritised rankings in search and conversations.
During the interaction, Musk said that X now now 550 million monthly users, generating 100-200 million posts every day.
Musk did not disclose how many paid subscribers it currently has.
During its last public earnings in Q1 2022, Twitter had mentioned 229 million mDAUs (monetizable daily active user).
IANS with superficial edits