New X accounts will now be required to pay a small annual fee before they’re able to post, like, bookmark, and reply.
Like many announcements regarding the social platform, details about the timeline and potential fees for new users are currently unavailable.
Last October, X began charging new unverified users in New Zealand and the Philippines $1 per year. These users could read posts but were unable to interact with them without paying a fee. It is possible that Musk will implement a similar fee structure for new users in other regions.
Earlier this month, X announced a significant crackdown on spam accounts, which could impact users' follower counts. This move, coupled with the plan to charge new users, suggests that the platform is aiming to address its bot problem more effectively.
It is worth noting that public posts on the platform may be used to train machine learning algorithms or artificial intelligence models. Musk previously stated in July 2023 that his AI company xAI would utilize public posts for model training purposes.
Recently, xAI made its Grok chatbot available to Premium users of X, who pay $8 per month. Previously, the chatbot was only accessible to users paying $16 per month for the Premium+ tier. Fortune reported last week that X intends to offer Grok to users for composing posts as well.
