https://techcrunch.com/2023/10/18/x-plans-to-use-payment-phone-and-id-verification-to-stop-bots-in-addition-to-the-new-1-yr-fee/

It’s official: X is charging users to use its service — a move X owner Elon Musk said would help the company combat bots and spam, something he’s repeatedly complained about even before acquiring the social network. But while critics, including WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg, have suggested that fees alone will not stymie the efforts of determined spammers, an X engineer took to the platform to explain that the nominal $1 per year fee was not the only tool X planned to use to deal with its bot problem. Instead, it’s only one piece of a broader plan to stop bots that may also include payment, phone and ID verification, in addition to traditional bot-catching methods involving heuristics.

On X, director of engineering Eric Farraro wrote, “I’ve read a lot of cynical takes about the $1 ‘Not a Bot’ feature and the verification program in general.” He said he understood the skepticism but noted that, in a matter of years, AI will be able to mimic human interactions by doing things like solving CAPTCHAs and generating photos and videos that will be “undetectable by human or AI countermeasures.” That means current methods of catching bots will need to evolve.