Comment by Arkhaine_kupo

> The financial barrier is an excellent guardrail against bots and drive

This is Musk argument but it fails on 2 important ways.

1) You had to pay to set up a bot farm to get X ammount of engagement before. Now you can pay 1 subscription and have access to the same or more engagement. So the financial burden to peddle things like Shitcoins is ludricusly lower

2) The subscription system is built ON TOP OF the system that previously meant trust. A system that still means verified in other platforms. Essentially hijacking trust through payment, which means the people who were educated on its meaning, or know about checks from a different platform are now EXRA succeptible to bad actors.

> I don't see how you get to the idea that you can only pay for X if you are in some kind of financial elite, it's just normal subscription.

Its not that _you can only_ pay it if youre rich. But lets say you wanna promote a specific idea, like idk "CRT is taught to children", which was an idea cooked up in a think tank to try and push for home schooling and defunding public education under the guise of some weird stuff being taught in schools.

You can easily coordinate buying accounts, talk points and the amplified attention of the subscription means you have a massive leg up. Compared to the other side, who would need to figure out what your plan is, grassroots organise, find funds for all its members to pay the subscription and then reply, without talking points and much higher risk of fucking up the response.

By virtue of having a megaphone you can pay for, you disrupt in large part the network effect of social media, and instead of consistent high quality posters you embolden and benefit people willing to pay. Its like Pay 2 Win but the whales are grifters and assholes.

> "Verification" is all well and good for the mainstream but pretty meaningless for niche and new voices; and we saw the consequences of unaccountable moderation for free speech by those doing the verification.

Well the consequences were pretty negligeble compared to the alternatives. FB tried low moderation and got to support 2 genocides. New Twitter has allowed neo nazi groups to organise and platform themselves, it has allowed the Turkish goverment and Saudi to disrupt dissent at home while they carry on bombings of Kurds and Yemenis respetvely.

Or is Trump getting banned from breaking the TOS much worse than Zuck and Musk allowing the taliban, Isis and any dictator who calls them get their way?