According to people familiar with the matter, Elon Musk (Elon Musk) is preparing to make a series of adjustments to its social networking platform X, including removing dates from posts displayed on the main timeline (timeline) and charging a $8 registration fee for new users of the X platform, which may fundamentally change the core functionality of the social media platform.

A person familiar with discussions within the X platform said that Musk proposed to employees the idea of canceling the date and time stamps on the X timeline in recent weeks. Two sources said the suggestion raised concerns among some employees that it might exacerbate misinformation.

Meanwhile, Platform X is also advancing another plan to charge a one-time fee for all new registered users. This means that new users need to pay an $8 registration fee to post on the X platform. According to people familiar with the matter, the plan will be implemented in February as soon as possible.

These moves will be one of the most significant changes since Musk bought Twitter (the predecessor of X) for 44 billion dollars at the end of 2022. Since acquiring X Platform, Musk has laid off more than 3/4 of the company's employees, including members of the trust and security team responsible for overseeing the site's content, and relaxed rules on the types of content that can be shared.

Delete post date

According to these people familiar with the matter, the proposal to remove the date stamp will be limited to the X platform post's timeline: if a user clicks on the post, the date the post was created will be visible. Musk told employees he believes this change will improve X's user interface. People familiar with the matter also said that Musk's consistent attitude towards the overall appearance of the X platform is that every pixel matters.

Despite this, the person familiar with the matter also pointed out that some X platform workers believe that the removal date will unnecessarily “confuse” the platform and may make the misinformation problem on the platform worse. Historically, most X platform users just randomly browsed on the platform and rarely clicked into a single post. And the lack of dates on the timeline may prevent most users from understanding the important context of the information they're seeing.

Since the X platform was created, showing users when a post was created has been a fundamental characteristic. Long before the company offered feeds driven by separate algorithms, its tweets were organized in chronological order.

X Platform representatives have yet to comment on this.

This potential adjustment to the X platform comes at a time of intense discussion about social media companies' responsibility to crack down on misinformation on their platforms.

On Tuesday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg (Mark Zuckerberg) just announced that several of its websites, including Facebook, Instagram, and Threads, will no longer fact-check content and rely on user feedback, which shocked the world. Meta, on the other hand, cites Musk's changes to X as a model for its current adjustment.

While Musk defines his relaxation of the X review rules as a love for “freedom of speech,” his ideas for design change are generally viewed as being in the aesthetic interest. Musk may be obsessed with such adjustments to the platform due to the need for aesthetics or anti-robot accounts, according to a person familiar with the matter.

In 2023, Musk proposed a similar idea. At the time, he requested that all headline text (headline text) appearing in the X post link preview be removed. However, soon after implementing this change, the situation was reversed, and the title reappeared in the link preview card, although the font size and position had changed more than once.

Like the title text above, removing the date stamp from the post this time may eventually not be implemented, or it may be launched as a brief test and eventually withdrawn or abandoned. Despite this, people familiar with the matter said that active discussions and plans are ongoing within the X platform around this change.

Paid registration

X Platform's other planned adjustment is to charge a one-time fee for all new registered users. According to the plan, the adjustment will be implemented as soon as February. New users will pay an $8 registration fee, but will also receive a free month of X Premium, a $7 monthly subscription service that provides users with a verified “checkmark” mark.

The move comes at a time when many large brand advertisers are fleeing from the X platform because of reports that hate speech and other offensive content have spread widely on the platform under Musk's management. One of the people familiar with the matter said that the X platform had been considering the $8 registration fee for several months, and its original intention was to crack down on robot accounts on the platform.

A year ago, Musk conducted a similar test and only charged a nominal $1 fee in the Philippines and New Zealand. X said at the time that such expenses would not be the driving force for revenue. According to people familiar with the matter, the same was true this time. However, the source also added that Musk said within the company that forcing more users to pay for the platform was “the only way” for X to make a profit.

The goal of charging registration fees is probably to generate as little revenue for the X platform as possible, because the size of its advertising business is less than half of what it was when Musk first bought Twitter. Today, however, users continue to flee the platform, so requiring new users to pay to use it is extremely rare.

Although platforms such as Google's YouTube also provide paid services, internet companies such as Alphabet (Google's parent company) and Meta have provided free services to users and have obtained huge revenue and over trillion dollars in valuation through advertising.

Currently, the X platform is also offering some ads, and recently the company also made it clear that all users' posts will be used to train its AI models. However, new users will be required to pay to use the platform.