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X, formerly Twitter, announced today that it is launching a new experiment to charge “newly unverified” users $1 per year to interact with posts. The company said that the test is currently live in New Zealand and the Philippines and existing users will not be affected.
Users will get to post content like, repost, reply, bookmark and quote on paying that fee. New free users will get a read-only account to view posts and follow accounts.
The company’s support account clarified that this “Not a Bot” program is not a driver of profit – but it’s hard to understand why at face value. The company owned by Elon Musk said the program will help it reduce spam.
“This new test was developed to strengthen our already successful efforts to reduce spam, manipulation and bot activity on our platform while balancing platform access with smaller fee amounts. This is not a factor in profit,” the company said.
On its support page, the company said it would share results regarding the effectiveness of the program to fight spam.
The move comes after Musk said X plans to charge users “a small monthly payment” to use its service. While payments in the testing program are annual, the ethos is the same.
