Media reported that this information was announced on Monday, September 18, during a conversation attended by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Musk appears to have said: “There is a small monthly fee to use System X”.

just for money

According to the source, the topic of the conversation was artificial intelligence. But at some point apparently the bot problem arose. According to Musk, a “small monthly fee” for access to his service is “the only way to eliminate the bot problem.”

According to its previous statements, X has 550 million monthly active users and creates 100-200 million posts every day.

bot issue

It’s not clear how a paid subscription could help fight bots, but Musk definitely believes in this plan and has already mentioned it several times. Take Russia, for example. Terrorists invest incredible amounts of money in propaganda, equipment, servers, malware development, human labor, and advertising of manipulative materials they call “news.” There is nothing stopping them from purchasing subscriptions to their bots and continuing their activities. Moreover, they are already doing this. Media outlets around the world have repeatedly published research exposing multiple Russian botnets that spread misinformation from pages marked blue, meaning they purchased Blue subscriptions and were further promoted by the algorithms in the recommendations.

Channel 24 wrote about this three times:

Such an approach may of course work indirectly, but it is definitely not in the company’s favor. Paid access may encourage users to leave X and switch to other services, including Threads, Bluesky, or others. After the audience drops to a certain critical level, Russia may not be interested in operating on this social network, because there will be no one left to spread propaganda – only hardcore Musk fans will remain on Twitter; mostly Republicans and without them they support Russia. Thus, the social network will really get rid of bots, but ordinary users will disappear sooner than that. And with them and advertisers, this will mean the ultimate death of Twitter.