Twitter users face anti-bot paywall

 Twitter users face anti-bot paywall

Mark Sellman

Technology Correspondent

TheTtimes | Wednesday September 20 2023

Elon Musk wants to introduce a pay-wall on Twitter/X to combat bots.

The owner of the social media network announced the move during a meeting with Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, that was broadcast on the platform.

“The single most important reason that we’re moving to having a small, monthly payment for use of X is it’s the only way I can think of to combat vast armies of bots,” Musk said.

The billionaire has focused on the issue of bot accounts since he bought Twitter. They are held responsible for spam, disinformation and hate speech and were one of the reasons he created X Premium, a paid-for service that costs £115 a year.

Now Musk has said that all users may have to pay a fee as it would force bot creators to use a different payment method every time they wanted to set up a new account. AI had made it easier for bot creators to evade human authentication tests, called Captcha, he said, but provided no other details.

The platform has suffered a drop in revenue, with a forecast of $3 billion for this year, down from $4.4 billion last year. The X chief has blamed campaigns from groups such as the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the Center for Countering Digital Hate, which have highlighted what they believe to be an increase in hate speech on the platform since Musk took over.

Their research has been supported by a study from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue in March that found antisemitic posts rose by more than 100 per cent in the months after Musk bought Twitter last October. The platform has reinstated the accounts of far-right activists as it pursues a policy that allows more extreme views but does not seek to promote them.

Netanyahu urged Musk to do more to combat antisemitism as he visited the Tesla factory in California.

Musk has threatened legal action against the ADL. He said that with 100 to 200 million posts on X a day, “some of those are going to be bad”.

Pre-reading part

Task1. Paraphrase the statement. Do you agree or disagree? Why (not)? How is the statement related to the headline of the article?

Internet is a great invention. It has changed the lives of nearly all people on our planet.

Task 1. Make a list of glossary words from the words and phrases given in bold and provide Russian equivalents in written form.

While-reading part

Task 2. Read the article and be ready to translate it.

Task 3. Find in the text of the article sentences containing new vocabulary and explain the meaning in English. Make up sentences of your own using the new vocabulary.

Task 4. Make up a dialogue/interview using the new vocabulary.

Post-reading part

Task 5. Divide the text of the article into logical parts. Make up 2 questions to each part to ask your groupmates.

Task 6. Be ready to discuss in the classroom with your group mates:

А) What was the correspondent’s intention to tell the general public about?

B) What is the main idea/problem raised?

Task 7. Give a summary of the article.

Task 8. Write a rendering of the article. Mind the rules of a rendering writing.

Task 9. Learn the new vocabulary from the article be ready to write the dictation-translation.