X, once known as Twitter, is also considering payment, phone, and ID verification alongside the new $1/year fee that it recently announced. X engineer Eric Farraro in a lengthy post explained that charging $1/year is only a part of a larger effort by X to combat misinformation and spam on its platform.
The broader plan of X also includes payment, phone and ID verification alongside the traditional heuristics and bot-detection models. He wrote that he’s read people being cynical about the $1 Not a Bot feature and the verification program in general but in few years AI would be able to easily solve captchas, and even generate photos and video that is indistinguishable from reality.
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“Some critics will rightfully point out that $1 or even $8 won’t stop all bots, which is true. The goal is to make it difficult and expensive enough that it’s less and less viable. Right now, the cost to have a human or script create accounts is pennies. Increasing the cost to even $1 starts to make this process much more expensive,” he wrote.
Farraro’s post echoes Elon Musk’s long-held belief that paid models are the future for social platforms. Musk believes that it’s inevitable for all social apps to eventually adopt paid models to ensure genuine human interaction in their networks. Requiring payment and phone number verification will add some obstacles to bot creation and make it more expensive for spammers.
X recently announced that it will start charging $1 a year from new users in Philippines and New Zealand. This is a test run only for new users in these two countries.
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