Musk’s X rolls out ‘not a bot’ subscription service in PH, NZ

Manila, Philippines – Elon Musk’s X, the social platform formerly known as Twitter, has rolled its ‘not a bot’ subscription service in the Philippines and New Zealand. For the company, the move is aimed at bolstering their efforts to reduce spam and and platform manipulations through bots.

According to a recent blog post by X, new accounts which will be registered in these two markets starting October 17 would be required to verify their phone number. Then, users would be now required to select their subscription plan.

Aside from X Premium or Verified Organizations plans, the ‘not a bot’ offering costs US$1 annual fee for new users in New Zealand ($1.43 NZD) and Philippines (₱42.51 PHP).

“This will evaluate a potentially powerful measure to help us combat bots and spammers on X, while balancing platform accessibility with the small fee amount. Within this test, existing users are not affected,” the company said.

Since Musk’s acquisition of Twitter happened in October 2022, he implemented paid verification services in the platform which has been always under scrutiny for being used by fake actors, with a study by SimilarWeb saying they prefer quitting the platform altogether than pay for a subscription service on Twitter.