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By Meghan Roos
Live Blog Writer
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Elon Musk has announced that X, formerly Twitter, will soon launch two new premium subscription plans for the social media platform's users.
Musk made the announcement early Friday morning in a post on X.
Initial details about the plans were limited. According to Musk, "One is lower cost with all features, but no reduction in ads, and the other is more expensive, but has no ads."
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Musk did not provide details on when the plans are set to launch, how much they will cost or whether they will be offered to all global users at the same time. Newsweek reached out to X for additional information via email on Friday.
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Musk's announcement followed an earlier subscription strategy shift the company announced on Tuesday. That plan, called "Not a Bot," requires new and unverified users to pay a $1 annual fee to sign up for an X account. This fee will enable them to post their own content and engage with content other users have shared, X's support team said.
The "Not a Bot" program is first being tested in New Zealand and the Philippines and is not impacting current users, the company said. "Not a Bot" is not intended as a "profit driver," X's support team added, writing in a post on X that it was instead "developed to bolster our already successful efforts to reduce spam, manipulation of our platform and bot activity, while balancing platform accessibility with the small fee amount."
The company began charging users for some of X's features shortly after Musk completed his purchase of the company last October. At the time, Musk announced plans to charge users for the blue checkmark that previously served as a verification badge on qualifying accounts. Users who wanted to keep their blue checkmark or add one to their account began paying $8 a month, or $84 a year, to do so. After Musk rebranded Twitter as X, that subscription model became known as X Premium.
Several other changes have been made to X in the last year under Musk, who served as the company's CEO for several months before appointing former NBCUniversal media executive Linda Yaccarino to fill the post in May. Shortly after taking control, Musk took then-Twitter, which was a publicly traded company, private. Months later, Musk changed the company's image by replacing its blue bird icon with a white "X" over a black background. And earlier this month, X removed news outlets' headlines from articles shared on the platform but kept main article images as clickable links to the shared content.
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