Elon Musk confirmed Monday that X (formerly Twitter) plans to start charging new users to post on the platform, TechCrunch reported.
Back when X launched the "Not-A-Bot" program, Musk claimed that charging a $1 annual fee would make it "1000X harder to manipulate the platform."
In a help center post, X said that the "test was developed to bolster our already significant efforts to reduce spam, manipulation of our platform, and bot activity."
X Support confirmed that follower counts would likely be impacted during that purge, because "we're casting a wide net to ensure X remains secure and free of bots."
Musk's plan to charge a fee to overcome bots won't work, experts told WSJ, because anyone determined to spam X can just find credit cards and buy disposable phones on the dark web.
And any bad actor who can't find what they need on the dark web could theoretically just wait three months to launch scams or spread harmful content like disinformation or propaganda.
The original article contains 798 words, the summary contains 165 words. Saved 79%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
I think the real solution is he wants money. If it was solely to reduce spam/bot activities, then there are other ways to do that. Maybe a Bitcoin-style proof of work scheme where evey post needs to show a hash of the message with a nonce. The difficulty needn't be that hard to make mass posting computaionally unfeasible.
In fact, Bitcoin appropriated this proposal to reduce email spam. It never took off with email as it was an open system and network effects and a catch 22 meant that it floundered. But X, née twitter is a closed off dictatorship. They could force it through edict.
Elon Musk said free speech like once and then immediately threw a bunch of journalists off the site. And apparently every news article for the rest of my life is going to be about how he was hypocritical instead of whether he wants power or influence or has power and influence or the meaning of giving him those things.
Don’t trust every industrialist you meet even if they invested in one company where competent people make cool space ships. He’s clearly on Ket and some uppers. Grimes divorced him and her music isn’t even good. He’s not that complicated.
free speech is a pretty complicated thing and i feel like many people dont have a solid grasp on it. i think a good number of people think they know what free speech means because they know "it only applies to what the government can do to you", but there's quite a bit more to it than that. like how to deal with hate speech, threats, misinformation, disinformation, etc.
and this is directly related to the problems twitter is facing: elon musk started out by saying hes a "free speech absolutist", but twitter has been slowly rediscovering why "free speech absolutism" doesnt work. and you can see those discoveries in real time with twitter reintroducing moderation policies (among other things)
Ok then. People know enough about what it means to know it doesn't refer to not having to pay a fee to open your mouth.
It's very clear that the headline is a little wordplay joke. It doesn't literally convey that the journalist thought free speech means you don't have to pay to make a twitter post. You're taking it way too literally.
elon musk started out by saying hes a "free speech absolutist", but twitter has been slowly rediscovering why "free speech absolutism" doesnt work.
I'm in agreement that it doesn't work.
But it should also be called to attention that Musk never tried free speech absolutism on his platform (not that I think he actually should). He has been willing to bend over backwards in assisting dictatorships in censoring content, and he culled a lot of left-leaning and anti-Musk accounts/comments on day one. It's always been a lie to pander to the freeze peach crowd.
Elon and his sycophants have been the idiots talking about free speech on Twitter. It's perfectly fine to use that talking point as criticism. If he's not interested in free speech then what was he doing allowing banned Nazi accounts back on?
SA used to be great. That move actually made the forums a pretty good place for a while because it kept out a few demographics including bots and kids.
Something Awful, YTMND and Newgrounds were basically the comedic engines of the internet back then.
I wonder if introducing an artificial delay, like hitting post, and it taking a minute before it actually goes live, would help. Because then something could scan incoming posts, and if something looked like a bot, it could be pulled before it ever actually went out.
An artificial delay should discourage flood attacks. Either that or do some sort of thing where you figure out how many posts per day the average user does and then not let people post above that limit.
Well, you have to limit the number of accounts they can possibly have by whatever method possible, either by charging per account or some sort of proof of work or phone number verification or something that limits the amount of accounts that they can have. Once you have done that, what you need to do is cost them something such as how proof of work costs computing resources. If it takes 10 seconds to post a tweet, then sending out 1 million tweets takes 1 million times 10 seconds or 10 million seconds, or 166,666 minutes or 2777 hours or 115.7 days And that's all from a 10 second Proof of work requirement. For a regular user, that's not a problem. For a spammer, that's a huge problem.
What your talking about is rate limiting. And pretty much every social media already does that. The issue with adding requirements like phone number etc, is that it also makes it more difficult and annoying for regular users. Besides, bot account owners litteraly have large amounts of fake valid mobile phone numbers they can use to "verify" their bot accounts. Then they also use change their ip addresses, so rate limiting can't be enforced. Instagram also has a massive bot issue, but its just an endless amount of bot accounts, not just one that is spamming all over the place.
Adding a fake 10 second delay would stop absolutely nothing and make the experience even worse for regular users.
Also, it very much depends on what you mean by "free". If you mean free as in free beer, then absolutely it is no longer going to be free speech. However, if you mean free as in freedom to say what you want, I don't know as I am no longer on the platform.
This seems like further confirmation of that theory that I saw posted on here that the Saudi oil barons funded Elon’s purchase of Twitter for the sole purpose of destroying it. They want to silence online discussions of climate change and other left wing topics.
Combined with Reddit being owned by Tencent, Facebook being eternally evil, and TikTok being unconducive to any form of coherent dialogue, there are not many places for left wing discourse on the internet anymore.
"climate change and other left wing topics"... I know that's basically how it works in some countries, but it's insane to consider certain scientific facts left wing, and we really shouldn't support such statements.
Thanks for pointing that out. It’s just so normal to think that way here that they’ve even corrupted me into framing climate change that way. It’s not a left wing topic; it’s a reality.
I just hope young people who are thinking of voting conservative here keep in mind that those assholes literally don’t believe in climate change and by extension science and facts. That alone should automatically disqualify conservatives from anyone’s consideration.
The reason it’s overwhelmingly called “climate change” instead of global warming now is because of language change pushed by billionaire foundations. The Koch network specifically focus grouped and created the term change. Whether we want it considered left wing or not, the billionaire backed right has made such statements left wing.
The reason it’s overwhelmingly called “climate change” instead of global warming now is because of language change pushed by billionaire foundations.
I do think "global warming" struggles to convince some more simple people anyway, unfortunately. Because while the average temperature of the globe is increasing and causing the changes in climate that we're seeing, I've come across far too many comments from people saying things like "global warming must be a myth because it snows more than it used to" and things themselves smarter than all climate scientists combined for that observation.
Of course, those same people probably think global warming is good because they like their summer holidays so perhaps their opinions shouldn't matter much either way!
You should read “Dark Money” by Jane Mayer. Goes into it and a lot of other very eye opening stuff about how the billionaire foundations changed this country.
Climate change was adopted because global warming doesn't intuitively line up with winters being much colder on top of the average temperature being higher.
Yes, in Europe, most political parties, both left and right, have their own climate change mitigation policies, because if they don't, they risk just not being elected.
I’ve had the same theory for a while. They saw the Arab Spring and other populist movements. With their vast oil wealth, tanking Twitter was a small price to pay to re-fracture descent and silence the left. The concentration of wealth has given insane power to wealthy who skew overwhelmingly on the side of themselves. The rise of the right is a direct result of billionaires funding across numerous avenues. The right aligns best with their self interest. They played the long game because they only have to pay people and let them do it for them. Regular folks have to stay engaged in the battle after working to support themselves. Billionaires are the matastasized cancer of capitalism.
Why would they spend billions for this when they could (and still can) just block the website? It’s not like you can sue the King in Saudi Arabia (lest you think you have too many heads)
Twitter is really big there. It's basically the most used social media by a vast majority compared to other ones. It's way more plausible that some 'too much rich to know what to do with all the money' Saudi princes decided something like a few percent of their wealth to own the biggest social media on their country for bragging rights and admin privilege to be worth it. Plus, they probably thought Twitter was too big to fail and die, They didn't expect Elon would fuck it up so bad.
I don't think anybody expected Elon to fuck it up so bad.
This seems like further confirmation of that theory that I saw posted on here that the Saudi oil barons funded Elon’s purchase of Twitter for the sole purpose of destroying it.
Then why does it still exist? Musk took Twitter private, they could've just pulled the plug if they wanted to.
The purchase itself was a leveraged buyout, they didn't pay the entire $44bn as Twitter took out a loan to cover $13bn. Like all leveraged buyouts (eg Toys R Us) the purchase itself is meant to kill the business. Even before Musk started screwing the revenue there was little hope Twitter could pay the interest, let along the principle. Now, Twitter is worth less than the debt, by some estimates.
This seems like further confirmation of that theory that I saw posted on here that the Saudi oil barons funded Elon’s purchase of Twitter for the sole purpose of destroying it.
Then why did Twitter needed to sue him to get him to abide by the deal? Musk often promotes stuff in a pump and dump scheme. One of the many examples is when he briefly promoted bitcoin. He made loads of money off that.
I'm guessing he thought he could make a lot of money quickly in some way. But then interest rates rose quickly and whatever he was planning fell through.
My bad, Reddit is still owned by an American company but Tencent has a large stake in it since 2019, at least enough to influence the platform into complying with pro-CCP censorship and etc
"This is going to make so much easy money", Musk thinks, delusionaly, as he further alienates the former core user base of the site he bought for literal billions of dollars and yet has never made any money. "They are going to be lining up to pay for this", he imagines, forgetting that paid checkmarks was a huge ass failure and twitter still has never turned a profit.
This is, I think his train of thought. He thinks Twitter is a utility that people need. Meanwhile, many of us never had an account and moves like this will just move people away. Before twitter there was other social media, and before social media we also got on fine.
There are literal alternatives to this service, I cannot believe people are still using it now. But surely this kills it?
Remember when some people were like "well, I don't support him, but I've had this Twitter account forever, so I'm not leaving." This is what happens. Things just get worse until you gain plausible deniability for continuing to support the bullshit.
Perhaps when his name/companies will stop being on the headlines every single day multiple times. Unless it's something really big that could actually harm his reputation people should restrain from posting and upvoting news about him. This article is about shit that hasn't happened yet, this guy is tricking you all around.
I use it because I follow a lot of Japanese artists and mangakas. It's nice because ya know Twitter is English so getting around is pretty easy. Stuff like pixiv seemed intimidating because it's made for a Japanese audience, even if they have English stuff. Plus I just know how to use Twitter after making my account in 2009.
This is like claiming Blizzard is infringing on your free speech because they banned you from world of Warcraft for saying racist shit.
Better yet. This is like claiming blizzard is infringing on your freedom of speech because they deactivated your account as a result of you not paying your subscription.
Corporations should be allowed to own vital services so they can ban people from them at will. This is a good thing somehow. I love monopolies that suppress activists and organizers because it would only be bad if the government is doing it.
That’s the thing about private property and private services. They can terminate your involvement at will for any reason. It’s in the user agreement you consent to when you sign up.
You’re not entitled to these services. They aren’t your god given right or any other bullshit you’re imagining.
I genuinely have to wonder if Musk is intentionally trying to kill Xitter, because if he's actually trying to recoup his "investment" he's going about it completely the wrong way
It's a numbers and modeling game. If we charge this much, how many users will we lose? If that number is less than what you will make by doing the change, then the change is worth doing.
That works until more of the user base leaves. Whose going to pay to tweet if no one is on the platform. It's "worth" it potentially in the short term, but long term it doesn't seem viable.
There was a theory that he was paid by a country like Saudi Arabia to take it down, sinces it's a powerful tool for a repressed population. Twitter was very important during the Arab Spring.
I scoffed at it before but it's starting to seem very plausible.
The purchase itself was a death sentence. $13bn of the $44bn was a loan Twitter took out to buy itself on Musk's behalf, even before Musk started tanking the revenue there was no way Twitter was going to be able to pay the interest on that without further cash investment.
Meanwhile, given that the business in unviable, Musk can try all sorts of crazy shit and are what sticks to the wall. Anything that proves successful can be adopted by whatever comes after Twitter or other social media. Charging for API access stuck, this is just the next attempt.