Elon Musk, owner of X/ Twitter, has mooted charging a "small monthly payment" to use the social media platform.
Free speech
Musk was speaking with the president of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, during a one-on-one dialogue session hosted on Musk's platform.
According to the BBC, Musk said X/ Twitter was "moving to having a small monthly payment for use of the system", saying that the intention of the payment was to significantly increase the cost of using bots on the platform.
Saying that bots were extremely cheap to use at the moment, "a fraction of a penny", and that raising the cost of using bots to a few dollars would make the cost of using bots prohibitive.
However, it is not yet clear how developed the plans for a payment system really are at the moment, as Axios noted that Musk has discussed introducing new features to the X platform before, only to not implement them.
Musk has a previous history of making statements and only sometimes following through on them.
For example, he has yet to fight Mark Zuckerberg, owner of Meta, in a cage match.
But the payment, if introduced, will be distinct from the current US$8 (S$8.90) monthly fee for Twitter Blue, now known as X Premium, which allows users to become "verified" with a blue tick displayed next to their username.
The proposed fee will be at a "lower tier pricing" than X Premium.
Musk also said X now has 550 million monthly users, posting about 100 to 200 million times a day.
Bots have been a perennial issue for Musk, who had previously cited bots as a reason to back out of the Twitter acquisition in 2022.
And as a June 2023 Slate article pointed out, continues to be a major issue of contention for him.
Sidelines
Netanyahu met Musk in New York, where he is attending the United Nations General Assembly.
He is expected to meet several world leaders on the sidelines, including U.S. president Joe Biden.
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Top image via @netanyahu/Twitter