Musk starts charging users Rs 84 per year to like posts on X; know reason why

X, formerly known as Twitter, will start charging users in New Zealand and the Philippines $1(Rs 84) a year. The company is trying out a new subscription method called “Not a Bot” for people in New Zealand and the Philippines to use their service. This is not for existing users; it’s only for new users who sign up.

The company says that this test is to make the platform better by reducing spam, fake accounts, and automated bots that cause trouble. To do this, X is asking new users to pay a small fee when they create an account. For people who already use the platform, nothing will change for them. This test is only for new users in those two countries.

“As of October 17th, 2023 we’ve started testing “Not A Bot”, a new subscription method for new users in two countries. This new test was developed to bolster our already significant efforts to reduce spam, manipulation of our platform and bot activity. This will evaluate a potentially powerful measure to help us combat bots and spammers on X, while balancing platform accessibility with the small fee amount. Within this test, existing users are not affected,” company wrote in a blog post.

The new method involves two steps- phone verification and in the second selecting your choice of plan. New sign ups on X in these countries will require users to verify their phone number first. For using the web version of the platform, new users will need to pay an annual fee, and the cost may vary depending on the country and currency they’re in.

With this fee, they will be able to do a bunch of things like posting content, liking other people’s posts, replying to them, sharing (reposting) or quoting their posts, and bookmarking posts to save for later. So, it’s a fee to access these features on the platform.

X announced the new policy in a blog post on Tuesday, saying that it is a pilot program designed to reduce spam and bot activity on the platform. Existing users will not be affected by the change.