Elon Musk potentially eyes locking Twitter behind a paywall to combat 'vast armies of bots'
As reported by the BBC yesterday, Elon Musk is planning to potentially add a paywall to Twitter, as per a conversation with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu which was live streamed on the site.
«We're moving to having a small monthly payment for use of the system,» Musk said, before explaining his reasoning. «If somebody even has to pay a few dollars or something, some minor amount, the effective cost to bots is very high.»
This is a head-scratcher for me, since I was under the impression that X Premium—previously called Twitter Blue, which is outlined in X's help section, which at the time of writing still refers to Twitter and «Tweets»—was meant to combat bots. This has, after all, been a mission statement of Musk's, after a tweet in April 2022 declared he would "defeat the spam bots or die trying".
Yet X Premium has replaced legacy verification, making the majority of important figures indistinguishable from someone who paid eight bucks. This has led to a situation where spammers can pay that fee to be prioritised in comments, with signal-boosted accounts. Or, they can be weaponized by chaotic users to temporarily dent the stock of a pharmaceutical company.
In my personal experience, most posts on Twitter are now plagued with a wall of incendiary comments or outright spam that I have to wade through to get to the actual discussion. Despite this, Musk insists that a smaller fee would counter bots already using its more expensive cousin: «We're actually going to come up with a lower tier pricing. So we just want it to be just a small amount of money … This is a longer discussion, but in my view, this is actually the only defence against vast armies of bots.»
There's also been some confusion as to what Musk
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