It always costs to be a human, and Elon Musk wants to make sure it does if you choose to use his social platform. If you live in New Zealand or the Philippines, you will need to hand over $1 a year just to be able to use the basic features of Twitter.
The subscription is part of the “Not a Bot” program. According to a post on Twitter’s help center, it will “bolster our already significant efforts to reduce spam, manipulation of our platform and bot activity.” If you have to charge people money to bolster something, I don’t think your efforts are that significant, but I digress.
New web users in New Zealand and the Philippines are required to verify their accounts with phone numbers, because why should we fear giving our personal numbers to a company that has more holes than Swiss cheese.
If they choose not to do this, they will not be able to post anything, and will have read-only access to the site.
The odd thing is, why is it just new users and new web users at that? Why not app users? Why not users already on the platform?
It makes me wonder what companies stopped selling ads on his platform lately to cause this move.
