Elon Musk threatens to put Twitter behind a paywall – The Sydney Morning Herald

By Isabella Ward and Marissa NewmanSeptember 20, 2023 — 5.42amElon Musk said that a small monthly service fee for using X could help fight off bot operations on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter.A subscription for all users would make “the effective cost of bots” very high and would require operators to use a new payment method for each account, the billionaire said in a conversation with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at Musk’s Tesla offices in Fremont, California.Musk said charging a fee may be the only way to remove a “vast army of bots” from the social network.Credit: ReutersNetanyahu, who questioned Musk about antisemitism and hate speech on the platform, had asked how he could prevent “vast armies of bots” from amplifying hate speech. X currently has a free tier and subscriptions for individual subscribers and brands, and Musk said bots are the “single most important reason” to shift to monthly payments.“This is a super tough problem,” Musk responded, saying that it’s the “single most important reason” he’s considering shifting to a monthly payment system. A bot costs a fraction of a penny to operate, he said, under X’s current system, which offers both free and paid
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