Updated posts 2026
Elon Musk’s social media platform, X (formerly Twitter), is running a trial in New Zealand and the Philippines, and it’s asking new users to pay a $1 annual fee. In return, they get access to key features like posting tweets, retweeting, liking posts, and replying.
If you’d rather not pay, you can still use X to read posts, watch videos, and follow accounts. The reason behind this change is to combat spam, manipulation, and bot activity on the platform. New users will also have to confirm their phone numbers as part of the sign-up process. And, according to Elon Musk, creating “read-only” accounts without the extra features will remain free.
The choice of test markets is worth noting. New Zealand and the Philippines differ sharply in size, income levels, and how heavily their populations rely on social platforms, which gives X two very different data sets from a single experiment. Testing in smaller markets also limits the fallout if the policy backfires, since a drop in sign-ups there carries far less weight than a similar decline in the United States or Europe. Rolling out a change of this kind gradually has become standard practice among platforms weighing whether users will accept a paywall at all.
This development follows Elon Musk’s recent hints that all X users might eventually have to pay for access. Ever since Musk acquired Twitter for $44 billion last year, the platform has been seeing a decline in revenue.
While making users pay might make sense financially, the main goal is to tackle the bot problem. Elon Musk has pointed out that it costs next to nothing to create a bot, just “a fraction of a penny.” But by introducing even a small fee, it becomes much more expensive for bots to operate.
X already offers a premium service called “X Premium,” which offers additional features for a monthly fee. However, moving X behind a paywall risks losing some users, which could affect the platform’s advertising revenue, its primary source of income.
Lately, X has been in the spotlight for possible issues related to terrorist content, hate speech, and violent content, leading to investigations by the European Union. Additionally, the platform has been fined by Australia’s internet safety watchdog for not cooperating with an inquiry into anti-child abuse practices. Tagged on Elon Musk’s social media platform X.
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