Soon you may have to pay for using Twitter. The social media company’s new owner Elon Musk has indicated that he might transition X (Twitter) into a fully subscription-based social network in order to fight bots.

“It’s the only way I can think of to combat vast armies of bots,” explained Musk. 

“Because a bot costs a fraction of a penny — call it a tenth of a penny — but even if it has to pay…a few dollars or something, the effective cost of bots is very high,” he said in a conversation with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday,

Musk didn’t specify how much users will have to pay but described it as a “small amount of money.”

Musk has pushing users to pay for using X. Earlier he had removed blue ticks for everyone and replaced it with a payment model under which users would get grey, gold, and blue ticks depending on the category of subscription.  X Premium (previously Twitter Blue) is offered at $8 per month or $84 per year subscription for which users get the ability to edit posts, get better rankings in search and conversations and the ability to write longer posts.

Many users threatened to quit the platform if they had to pay for the service. “Elon Musk when buying Twitter “I’ll bring free speech back to Twitter” Elon Musk the reality “You must pay to be on Twitter” aka pay to speak. Talk about a full 180 on your word,” tweeted Tyler Scheid, a podcast host.

Market experts, however, said that the main problem for users is that there are no other platforms that rivals Twitter. “Every time Twitter or Musk announces a new thing, users outrage and look for alternative platforms. However, after using other platforms for a few days, they all come back to Twitter. Even when Meta launched Threads to rival Twitter, there was an initial rush to join the new platform but it has not sustained,” said an industry expert.

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