For new users who choose not to pay, their capabilities will be severely limited. While they can follow others and view their feeds, the ability to tweet, retweet, reply, and send direct messages to other users will be locked behind the $1 annual subscription paywall. Musk has strongly advocated for this move, asserting that it’s “the only way to fight bots without blocking real users.”
X’s support team describes this as a “test” rather than a profit-generating endeavor, emphasizing that it’s aimed at combating bots and spam. However, this reasoning is met with skepticism by many. There are numerous reasons to question X’s commitment to battling misinformation, as evidenced by the removal of third-party content moderation tools and the elimination of features that allowed users to report fake news. Furthermore, legal actions against X have been initiated by Australia’s online safety regulator due to an increase in hate speech on the platform. Earlier this year, the company also significantly reduced its ‘election integrity team.’
