Final Straw: Will You Start Paying For Twitter — Umm, "X"?

Source: Anadolu Agency / Getty

The rise of Twitter from being that cool little social app that happened to go viral at SXSW 2007, to becoming a global lifeline that digitally connects and informs the world on a by-the-second basis, is a success story that can only be rivaled by the parallel ascension of Facebook.

While the latter social platform still has Mark Zuckerberg to keep the brand’s “little-engine-that-could” narrative going strong, the same can’t quite be said for Twitter after now-former CEO Jack Dorsey opted to sell off his prized platform to tech billionaire Elon Musk. Now simply called “X,” the Tesla mastermind made a few other big changes that heavily affected current users, including a mandatory payment on verified accounts and plans to remove the feature that allows a person to block unwanted followers.

Now, it appears the final straw has been drawn after it was recently revealed that Musk plans to issue, in his words, a “small monthly payment” for all users of Twitter — err, we mean “X”!

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While meeting with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu for a roundtable tech talk yesterday (September 18), Musk explained that the subscription would be “lower tier pricing,” particularly less than the $8-per-month that current verified accounts are paying. “It’s a longer discussion, but in my view this is the only defense against vast armies of bots,” he said at the 34:55 mark during the livestreamed conversation (seen below), going on to add, “because as AI gets very, very good, it’s actually able to pass these sort of CAPTCHA tests better than humans.”

Now let’s think about this for a second: on one hand, Musk is expecting the world at hand to get behind paying somewhere in the range of $1 to $5 a month for a service that’s been free for over a decade-and-a-half. At the same time, the rapidly increasing advancements of A.I. have in fact made it very hard to decipher the real from the augmented. At a time when deepfakes, identity theft and digitally generating just about anything are all at an all-time high, could a dollar-per-month surcharge for access to social media be the key to saving us from digital domination?

See what many are saying over on X (while it’s still free!) about the idea of paying for their formerly-known-as-Twitter account, and let us know what your wallet has to say on the subject:

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1. He is throwing spaghetti on the wall; maybe it will stick, maybe it won't. This is how @elonmusk develops products and features.

via @ReuvenSoraya

2. I don’t think that would be a bad idea. Especially if it means a lot more attention and features for the platform. Shouldn’t go above 99 cents though.

via @Boogidaball

3. Mass exodus to ensue.

via @fradmin

4. On one side it would reduce the bots dramatically…on another, payed freedom of speech is not freedom of speech…

via @Deffycos

5. I am addicted to Twitter, but I won't pay for it. I am not a big fan of Threads, but maybe it will become better if everyone moves over. I can very well see this ending twitter if enough users refuse to pay and migrate elsewhere.

via @hekinhtx

6. We'll leave, there will be a mass exodus. And the issue isn't payment. The issue – specifically – is not wanting to give Elon Musk our bank info.

via @chiller

7. Lmfao

via @staceycrussell

8. My entire TL when they found out elon wants to charge a monthly payment

via @Nand076

9. Me when that happens…

via @iamtemisanadoki

10. Elon Musk asking people to pay for Twitter

via @atrupar