Access to Twitter could become a pay-per-use for everyone. This is not a hoax or one of those jokes that periodically circulate among chat rooms and message boards. That would be one of the proposals from the company’s new owner, Elon Musk. The world’s richest man is desperately looking for a way to monetize the platform’s business and thus return on the $44 billion investment needed to complete its acquisition.
Paywall: Twitter to pay for the entire community
This was written by the editorial staff of the website Platformer, made aware of the hypothesis by a source who, for obvious reasons, remained anonymous. The reference is not to the Blue subscription (from $8 per month) required to show the verification badge but to a paywall to place the entire social network. In other words, a monthly subscription is required of all 330 million active users if they want to continue reading and posting tweets.
From the new CEO and his entourage, at the moment, there has been no confirmation or denial of the rumor. However, we have no trouble imagining how any such announcement could accelerate that exodus to other platforms that already began last week. So far, the open-source alternative Mastodon has been beneficial so far which has welcomed many new subscribers in just a few days.
Elon Musk and what remains of Twitter (after the heavy round of layoffs) also have to deal with the flight of advertisers, who are intimidated by the direction taken under new ownership. This inevitably translates into declining revenues. Above all, coming into the crosshairs are changes to the rules for content moderation: there are fears of an uncontrolled proliferation of fake news and posts of questionable nature.