The social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, may soon charge all users to pay a “small” monthly subscription fee -- something our viewers say they will not do.
Company owner Elon Musk said last week that the company is “moving to have a small monthly payment for use of the X system” in an effort to fight “armies of bots” that troll the platform. Musk believes that requiring each account to register a new credit card would make it harder for bots to create accounts.
“It’s the only way I can think of to combat vast armies of bots,” Musk said.
Twitter/X already charges around $8 per month for X Premium subscribers. The company plans to release a separate subscription option that costs less, though an exact amount wasn’t disclosed. Musk said the “lower tier” subscription would be “just a small amount of money.”
Though the move may help slow the trolls, ClickOnDetroit readers largely did not show any support for a monthly Twitter/X subscription, no matter the reason. In a poll we posted Thursday, 85% of respondents said they would “definitely not” pay a monthly subscription to access the social media platform.
In comparison, 2% of the over 1,000 respondents said they would “absolutely” pay the fee, 3% said it “depends how much” the fee is, 1% of respondents said they weren’t sure yet, and 9% said they don’t use Twitter/X to begin with.
We also asked our readers if they would instead switch to Threads, a similar text-based social media platform run by Meta, or maybe something else in light of the potentially required X subscription. Not as many people responded to this question, but among those who did, 57% said they “use platforms other than Twitter/X, Threads and Mastodon.”
The second-largest majority, 23%, said they’ve already switched to Threads, while 3% said they’ve switched to Mastodon. About 17% of respondents said “nothing beats Twitter/X.”
Musk did not say when the possible monthly subscription would be rolled out. The owner and Tesla CEO has announced features without following through on them in the past.