So much for free speech on X; Musk confirms new users must soon pay to post
So much for free speech on X; Musk confirms new users must soon pay to post
The fee, likely $1, is aimed at stopping “relentless” bots, Musk said.
This seems like further confirmation of that theory that I saw posted on here that the Saudi oil barons funded Elon’s purchase of Twitter for the sole purpose of destroying it. They want to silence online discussions of climate change and other left wing topics.
Combined with Reddit being owned by Tencent, Facebook being eternally evil, and TikTok being unconducive to any form of coherent dialogue, there are not many places for left wing discourse on the internet anymore.
It's completely absurd that he's saying this as an anti-bot measure. The bots exist because they generate revenue for the scumbags behind them, a small fee is just going to be part of doing business for them. He's not trying to stop bots, he's trying to monetize them and use them as an excuse to charge everyone. "The bot problem" will never be fixed and will be used as an excuse for every anti-user measure they put forward.
You have to pay him so that you can do the work of creating content for his platform? No thanks
I work in bot protection and it's a sound idea but doesn't really work in practice. As long as there's more than 1$ of value to be gained it's worth it for the bot makers.
This also makes it so that botting is only accesible to select few actors that have the required resources i.e. russian troll farms or large bot networks from china, in turn this increases their value. This is very good for them.
Reality is that the only way to stop bots is to constantly change up the detection system. This is called a "cat and mouse" sort of problem and it really is the only way to do it. The attacker always has to catch up and it can be trivial that takes them couple of hours to do but it also reveals behavior patterns for marking bot accounts. This actually works really well in practice but requires a lot of dev resources and many companies low-key like bots which is another thread entirely.
Lol I'm not paying shit, have fun everybody else. X is garbage
For the love of god Elon, stay out of my news feed.
I'm not a fan of him, nor a twitter user, but as far as free speech is concerned, that should mean your opinion is not censored, but the platform doesn't have to be free to use, but if it doesn't discriminate opinions, and everyone is allowed to make an account, and everyone has to pay the same
That's equal treatment, and isn't going against free speech.
Are these new users in the room with us? lmao
This is the best summary I could come up with:
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!
tfw the free speech isn't even free monetarily
My tracking app doesn't let this site load at all, so I didn't read the article, but fuck musk. Will he remove ads when people pay them? I forgot my password for Twitter since last year and never bothered to log back into that cesspool
Money is speech? This is clearly in-line with current US legal definitions so what's the problem?
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"Unfortunately, a small fee for new user write access is the only way to curb the relentless onslaught of bots," Musk wrote on X.
...that makes no sense. By "bots" usually we mean accounts that advertise one thing or another to make money. And if there's any cause worth paying money for, it's making more money. But some sports fan or BTS stan or whatever just wanting to cheer on their thing is just gonna stop posting.
"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 isn't useful or sufficient. You have to consider how many bots get banned and cost to determine efficacy. If you want 10,000 fake people to manipulate real people $10,000 doesn't seem a high price if you make the fake people act organic enough that they largely aren't banned.
It would be more useful if a singular service verified sufficient credentials to prove you were an authentic human and allowed you to auth to various sites. This in turn creates the problem that verifiers now know a LOT about your online life.
If the verification involved site -> verifier -> government held public key I think you could arrange so that none of the parties had enough info to identify users.
Good news for X alternative Social Media, if pay to post for X I'm exit form X.
We're going to be 🤑 rich! Rich I tell you!
Well, one more reason to ignore that platform on it's way to obsolescence.
Keep digging Musk. Lmao
yeah, I think he is doing it now. Because if you dont boost, unlikely anyone will see what you tweet.
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They should do that for meeting people for dating....like a love tax or something... Pay some random so you can talk to people of your interested sex.
Welcome to the death spiral