Elon Musk said he will charge all X/Twitter users a fee to be on the platform. He suggested that such a change would be necessary to deal with the problem of bots on the platform.
“It’s the only way I can think of to combat vast armies of bots," said Elon. I can’t believe that this is the only solution he can think of.
Dealing with bots would be Elon Musk’s responsibility, considering he’s the only one profiting significantly from X, not us. Elon Musk steals our data and censors each of our posts, now he even expects us to pay to clean up the mess he created.
Plus, the problems with X go beyond just bots. The algorithm and programming decisions are negatively impacting user experience and manipulating people’s minds.
We want a town square where everyone is free to have & voice an opinion. I do not believe we have to pay ”a small monthly payment” for such a place, especially in a country that should value these freedoms & suppressing ideas.
Before Musk took over, Twitter was profitable. So you know you can make a profit without asking for subscription, and while being honest with ads (they were labeled and vetted properly).
That is not true. Twitter was not profitable and they were never “honest”. They engaged in ad tracking and data mining like all Big Tech.
Source: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/delisted/TWTR/twitter/gross-profit
And at least they labeled their ads accordingly. People have reported that ads were not labeled in their feed in the last month.
https://www.brex.com/journal/gross-profit-vs-net-profit
Twitter made a small profit in 2018 and 2019. They lost money in every other year.
In fact the year before Musk started ranting about buying it, they reported their biggest loss ever.
The company was a disaster before and after Musk.