 "Elon Musk")
In the most significant change brought to X (formerly Twitter) till date, the social media site has now begun rolling out a US $1 annual charge for new users in New Zealand and the Philippines. This new program is in addition to X's main subscription of $8 per month.
"As of October 17, 2023 we've started testing 'Not A Bot', a new subscription method for new users in two countries. This new test was developed to bolster our already significant efforts to reduce spam, manipulation of our platform and bot activity," the company said in a blog post.
"This will evaluate a potentially powerful measure to help us combat bots and spammers on X, while balancing platform accessibility with the small fee amount. Within this test, existing users are not affected," it added.
New X users who do not pay the $1/year fee will only be able to take "read-only" actions, such as reading posts, watching videos and following accounts, according to X.
The Musk era in Twitter
There have been many changes in the company since Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk took over, some of which have been rather contentious, such as when he opted to restore suspended accounts to controversial figures like influencer Andrew Tate and US rapper Kanye West.
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Here we take a look at such changes:
1. Musk's most notable change was taking the publicly traded company private. Shares of the company can no longer be purchased on the stock market.
2. Immediately after taking over, Musk fired Twitter's top three executives - Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Parag Agrawal, Chief Financial Officer Ned Segal and legal affairs and policy chief Vijaya Gadde. What began with the top three executives soon trickled down the company's ranks, with Twitter laying off more than half of its 7,500-strong workforce. The company also ended its deals with a number of contractors. Musk also showed the door to a number of employees who had criticised him online or in private.
3. The communications department of the social media company was also scrapped by Musk soon after his takeover, which is also in line with his other companies, Tesla and SpaceX, which do not have such departments of their own. National Public Radio (NPR) has confirmed that when it sent a press enquiry to Twitter in April 2023, the company replied with a faeces emoji.
4. In an unprecedented move, Musk, on December 18, 2022, conducted a poll on Twitter, asking users whether he should step down as the company's CEO. He said that he would "abide by the results of this poll".
When the decision came in favour of Musk no longer being Twitter's CEO, he took time but ultimately announced Linda Yaccarino as the new CEO.
5. After some of Musk's controversial decisions, Twitter started losing huge amounts of advertisement revenue, and this was the perfect moment for Musk to introduce paid verifications in the form of Twitter Blue. What only important officials and celebrities had till then was finally opened up to the masses. Twitter even unveiled a slew of new features for subscribers of Twitter Blue that are not available to free users. To level the playing field, Twitter removed the 'legacy' verification badges of all individuals who were not subscribed to Twitter Blue.
6. In another policy shift, Twitter, in June 2023, began designating the words 'cis' and 'cisgender' as slurs.
7. Musk, in July 2023, rebranded the platform as X over the summer, replacing the well-known blue bird associated with Twitter.
8. He also revealed that the platform has implemented temporary limits on the number of posts users can read in a day. Under the new restrictions, verified accounts will be allowed to read up to 6,000 tweets daily, while unverified accounts will be limited to 600 tweets.
8. In August 2023, Musk announced that the platform would no longer allow users to block accounts. Users will still be able to mute other accounts and block users in their direct messages
10. In October, X stopped displaying headlines on posts linking to news articles on its desktop website. Elon Musk said it was an effort to improve how the platform, formerly Twitter, looks.
Musk has now said in a subscriber-only post that he also plans to delete the numbers of replies, retweets and likes on posts shown in the timeline, leaving only "view count".
