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.
My sides
Please
If this dude had any experience running an online site he would know how many stolen credit cards are out there.
X is a fly-coated chum bucket.
Hey now....that's really rude! If fly-coated chum buckets could read they would be very very upset!
Was just about to say this.
You know how easy it is these days to get credit card dumps? Legally, I don't know the exact answer, but...
Or PayPal accounts.
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.
Politicising climate change was yet another distraction from dealing with it in a cohesive and unified manner. Divide and conquer.
Found the round-earther.
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.
In 2024, anything that makes sense is un-conservative.
Reality has a left-wing bias.
And yet, here we are :/
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.
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.
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.
Yeah that’s possible too. It’s all speculation until the Netflix documentary comes out years later lol
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.
It’s possible it was a initially pump and dump that turned into a Saudi funded venture. He’s a useful idiot from the Arabs’ perspective.
Conservatives are desperately trying to force TikTok to sell because even though its format is garbage, it's gathered a large leftwing userbase
Holy shit you might be right
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.
That terse action would have made mastodon flourish. It had to be gradual.
Reddit’s owned by tencent now? When did this happen?
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
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.
Anti-user measures on a social media platform
Meanwhile, everyone will bitch about the absurdity of this and how shitty Musk and his followers are, then continue to use the platform daily as though it's an essential service. Anyone who hasn't jumped ship my now is either complacent or wholly supportive.
What’s the alternative for one-to-many communication? I don’t use the platform anymore, but I miss a massive amount of news related to most of my hobbies due to it, normally relying on Reddit users to repost them. It’s incredibly annoying to have to search through 10+ social media pages to check for updates about a race team during a race or an ongoing gaming event.
Mastodon doesn’t have anywhere near the adoption necessary, bluesky still hasn’t taken off.
That's the rub, every social media service with any uptake is bad from a privacy perspective because the only real way to make them profitable is to sell ads.
So, what are you looking to get out of it? RSS is still a thing, services like lemmy are decent at aggregating links (post the content you want, and hopefully others will help), and bookmarks work well if you just need a dozen or so sites.
I honestly never use Twitter, Facebook, etc, and I feel like I'm about to keep tabs on things reasonably well.
I don't see that. I see a lot of people who assume these two groups are the same people. But most of us don't use Twitter still. That's why their non-bot userbase is steadily declining. People are leaving. People are abandoning the platform.
No, stop, please, don't kill your platform, no, stop. Eh, nevermind.
Part of me really buys into the idea that Musk is pulling an evil mastermind move with his other billionaire pals, destroying one of the biggest social media sites to keep users fractured. End goal keeping any community small and unable to organize at scale. Then the voice of reason tells me this just another egotistical nepo baby trying to staunch the hemorrhaging of money from his last bad investment.
Stock was at 420 and that was all that matters
This is still my opinion. I hated shitter before boy wonder musk took over. It sucked before and it sucks worse now. Just kill it.
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
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.
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.
A lot of decisions at Xitter were made seat-of-the-pants by Muskiboi. No modelling going on and if there is, they're really bad at it.
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.
Maybe he's just trying to make it cheap enough for Dorsey to buy it from him.
If he's not careful he's going to make it cheap enough for me to buy it from him.
WHY THE FUCK IS ANYONE ON TWITTER ANYMORE.
It has a "chicken or egg" problem. There are better alternatives, except many don't use them because their userbase is still on Xitter, and said userbase don't want to move away from Xitter because their faves are still there. I deleted it from my phone, but I keep my account in case I need to look up something there, or to not get my identity stolen and exploited.
Bluesky has limited federation active already, planning to enable full federation soon (they want mod tooling to be more robust before they do)
Pretty nice place. The user configurable moderation system with 3rd party labeler services and more is quite cool and it's working even better than hoped (but we'll need to see how it scales)
For some (few) users, it's required for work. The rest are addicts or Musk fans.
You have to pay him so that you can do the work of creating content for his platform? No thanks
Anyone who still uses Twitter/X is an actual fucking moron.
True to a degee, but too many international journalists still depend on that plattform. Makes it hard to ditch it completly, until finally one of the alternatives really pick up.
Never used it. Never plan to do so.
Very aggressive, I use Twitter for porn, I don't know how that's any more moronic than using any other platform that hosts porn.
Musky: Hmm, how else can i drive away actual human users?
Add lootboxes and timers.
If you don’t pay to post, there’s a 50% chance of your post getting deleted after anyone sees it. Pay some money to get more favorable odds. Oh, but you don’t but that stuff with money. You gotta use xitter turds first that, and some times you can get those from xitter boxes. In order to buy the lootboxes, you have to spend real money.
If you haven’t bought any lootboxes in a month, xitter will take control of your account and start automatically posting flat earth nazi crypto trash.
Pretty much. 1usd per bot is a small price for maintaining a bot farm.
Or do they plan on banning accounts that use the same billing info? If CNN or BBC pay for their employees accounts, would they get banned?
Who is going to pay to post on twitter? Not only has he destroyed what was there but he's stopping any route for growth with new users. Most people won't bother.
He really has managed to destroy that company with his knee jerk decisions.
People with "hot link in bio" and all that jazz
Gotta get them 44 billion back somehow.
Well, this ain't it chief
Who would have thought that Twitter would become the new Somethingawful forums, and that Musk would take the role of Lowtax.
aoh man. So apt and too soon.
Is SA still around?
Yes, and it still kicks ass. Come home, goon.
If you do your browsing on mobile, check out the Awful app.
I’ve seen web writers claim that the original brain trust of Weird Twitter started from a Something Awful clique
That’s not what free speech is, and there never has been free speech on Twitter, and that’s mostly a good thing. Jesus.
That’s not what free speech is
Well yeah, obviously. It's just wordplay based on the two common definitions of free.
Everybody knows what free speech means. It's just a bit of wordplay that you've taken very literally.
Everybody knows what free speech means.
i really dont think so.
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)
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.
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?
Free speech, now only $9.99 per month
Upgrade your free speech to premium speech now for only $17.99
or 0.99/post.each retweet would cost you an additional 0.49. you pay less,you get less.
You don’t know what free speech means.
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.
Do better.
This is not going to stop bots.
here's hoping it stops site growth
Most people don't get out of bed for a dollar so no, it won't outside the usual 10-30% pareto ratio, which is probably already getting impacted by Xitter being run into the ground.
This will absolutely stop by far the most bots, because hostile governments like Russia and China use THOUSANDS of bots, having to pay $1 extra to maintain each bot, will be prohibitively expensive for those governments. Remember this can mean THOUSANDS in extra cost for those programs. No way either Russia or China will be able to afford that. So my guess is this will be 99.99% effective at preventing bots. The problem for Musk that he may not have foreseen is, the same will be true for MAGA racist anti LGBT propaganda bots. So now Twitter will go back to be dominated by liberals and socialists. Making it necessary for Musk to pay for another platform all over again, if he wants to have a free space to blurt his idiocy.
/s
Isn't that the started intent? Like adding a small roadblock or captcha.
I'm not saying I agree but the simple logic should work. It'll likely reduce the user base and still let bits in with cash to burn.
I work in bot protection and it's a sound idea but doesn't really work in practice. As long as there's more than 1$ 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.
I'll ask anyway. Why do companies like bots?
As Kungen already answered - stats! You can sell bot traffic as real traffic which inflates your numbers.
For stuff like social media, bots increase engagement too. Many new products and networks actually generate a lot of fake content to attract organic growth. I.e. if bot likes your comment you're likely to engage more. If it likes your product review you're likely to review more stuff etc.
Tracking bots can also generate reverse analytics. For example if you know that your competitors are scraping fishing equipment data from your store it could mean they're working on a competing fishing related product.
Lastly, you can feed fake data to bots to manipulate competitors. This is somewhat illegal (no real legal precedent yet afaik though its a clear intent to harm other businesses) but it can really powerful in the wrong hands.
Edit: worth nothing that a lot of bot traffic is good. Sometimes you want to be scraped as it is a form of organic engagement and increases the value of your data and often backlinks growth (e.g. indexers like Google etc)
More eyeballs.
Enough updoots or retweets and other algos pick up on it. Some random twitter discussion ends up on BuzzFeed, YTers start making influencer vids, and Reddit / Lemmy repost bots.
Do this enough and it'll gain traction. Now everyone is talking about your stupid fuckin Stanley mug, corporate rumor,or political talking point.
And this can be automated end to end, 24/7, by market and keyword, will real time feedback as to how well it's doing via upvotes, shares, likes, or even data mining emails and convos via Gmail or WhatsApp.
As long as there’s more than 1$ of value to be gained it’s worth it for the bot makers.
That's what I was coming in here to suggest, so I'm glad someone in the field was able to back that idea up. I think it's unlikely many bots that aren't made for fun are being put on Twitter unless they are generating a lot more than $1 for whoever is putting them up.
Bot protection? Call me ignorant but what exactly do you do?
develop systems that can identify unwanted users like bots, spammers, people who abuse the product and break ToS etc. Most bad actors are very dumb but fighting this at scale is actually very interesting. Also most bots (like 90%) are just scrapers (data collectors) especially when it comes to Twitter which has absurd API pricings but cost almost nothing to scrape lol
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.
I'd bet that is explicitly part of the funding model. Pay to influence consensus, cuz this is a publicly traded stock and numbers need to go up, regardless of who is paying.
Twitter is private. Musk took it private when he bought it.
When will people stop supporting this clown?
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.
Lol I'm not paying shit, have fun everybody else. X is garbage
Please. I truly want to see my favorite people on Twitter get driven to a better platform.
Unfortunately, they’re going to Threads. Although I guess that’s technically better. But better in the sense that drinking piss is better than eating shit.
I never got the appeal of twitter/x, and I never will. I get other social networks, some more, some less, but Twitter's just stupid IMO. I hope that shit'll die sooner than later.
I can’t get past the og twitter which was everyone blogging minutiae of their life. What they ate for lunch. What street they’re walking down. What they thought of the music on the radio.
Somewhere along the way people tried to make it legit, but also it was people trying to claim firsties for any event worth mentioning.
It’s just a crap platform. Too much bs to wade through to find anything good.
I get the appeal of twitter. I've said this before. You want to know tour dates? When that next book in the series is coming out. When a new game trailer is available? Movie trailer? You want to know about when a vlog creator posts their newest content? Twitter was good for those things. I used to use it for that. Now it's just useless for most things. And I'm back to using RSS feeds, more than half of which don't work properly.
Twitter has always been pointless to me except for outage notices etc, and that's just because that's where the companies chose to post. The second there is a "town board" style app with all company announcements etc then it's completely pointless.
Hopefully more people change to mastodon now
*keys and *omas are more fun though. mastodon's way too businesslike to encourage a fair share of people to pick it over shitter (it works other way around as well tho)
K bye.
Not that I literally ever said hi.
For real, shit platform with no real life benefit gets even shittier who would’ve thought
Paid speech? Lol
It’s the American way. Aligns with the Supreme Court ruling on Citizen’s United.
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!
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.
For the love of god Elon, stay out of my news feed.
There are extensions for that.
This is just another attempt at establishing a new status quo for other social media before Twitter dies a death due to the insurmountable debt that Musk's purchase saddled it with. We've had a bunch of things tried, so far the only thing that stuck was charging for API access (which reddit soon adopted). Let's not have this as well, please.
Hopefully Twitter dying because of this will give other companies pause (or not, would it really be that bad if facebook kills itself copying him?)
Are these new users in the room with us? lmao
tfw the free speech isn't even free monetarily
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.
None of that was ever true for Twitter, anyway. It wasn't true before Musk bought it and it's only got worse.
Free speech? More like free* speech
*Only $4.99/month, yeah, definitely "free"
Fee speech
Why didn't I think of putting this in my comment?
Meh, you still ise Twitter, you get what you deserve.
What does vaggumon digivolve to? MetalVaggumon. ヴァグモン
Indeed I deserve porn, so I get porn.
Free to play speech
Pay to play speech
Money is speech? This is clearly in-line with current US legal definitions so what's the problem?
\s
"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.
Well, you can invest money to get rid of bots, or you can try to make money to get rid of bots. He tries the latter, and will kill the platform doing that.
"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?
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.
This is desperately needed
Didn't he say this like 5 times already
Well, if nothing else, it does reduce some load on their servers because less people will be posting.
People still use Xwitter?
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.
Unfortunately the entire games industry is still on Xitter and nobody wants to leave it completely for Bluesky or Mastadon.
Only fascists and those who support fascists do.
We're going to be 🤑 rich! Rich I tell you!
Would not give him 56 cents
That's 56 too much
Good news for X alternative Social Media, if pay to post for X I'm exit form X.
I like to be on x-twitter now
O.K. by me on x-twitter now
Every speech free on x-twitter now
...
For a small fee on x-twitter now.
Yea hey xitter my xitter now
Pay to be free like me on xitter now
Speech is only money on xitter now
...
Take it in the the xitter now xitter now
What's this to the tune of?
America
Keep digging Musk. Lmao
Well, one more reason to ignore that platform on it's way to obsolescence.
lmfao fuck off musk sure it is
yeah, I think he is doing it now. Because if you dont boost, unlikely anyone will see what you tweet.
Free speech is free speech only if your dictator tells you so.
Social media was never about free speech.
You might want to do some research on what free speech means because this is cringe.
🍿