Ripple CTO confronts Elon Musk over X’s new user fees
Key Takeaways
- Ripple CTO David Schwartz is challenging Elon Musk’s new policy of charging X users, saying it contradicts his declared defense of absolute freedom of expression.
- This policy aims to reduce bot activity.
- The cryptocurrency community remains divided over the effectiveness of the policy.
David Schwartz, Ripple’s chief technology officer, said publicly: Elon Musk’s recent decision to charge new X users was criticized. This, they argue, contradicts Musk’s declared support for freedom of expression.
According to the new policy, New users have to pay a small fee to post, like, reply or bookmark. On the platform.
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Musk claims that these measures: Designed to prevent bots and spam. He said they have become sophisticated enough to bypass standard security measures. This policy is already in effect in New Zealand and the Philippines.
Despite Musk’s explanation, Ripple’s CTO David Schwartz said the policy: This contradicts the platform’s founding principles and Musk’s promise of “absolute” freedom of expression.
The debate escalated into a comment from user X. Musk defended the policy, saying it was aimed at silencing bots rather than people. That’s a big difference.
Schwartz countered that the real big difference between the two is whether Musk cares or not: The policy only protects speech that aligns with his preferences. The CTO also added:
Once again, I am not the one who made the foolish claim that all legal speech should be allowed on this platform. I know that legitimate but annoying low-value speech makes this platform worse.
ZachXBT, a prominent figure in the cryptocurrency research community, Also weigh it, questioning the effectiveness of this policy. he emphasized it Fraudulent accounts already pay “thousands of dollars” to get verified by X, so a small fee is not enough.
This policy and the debate it has sparked reflect the broader challenge of finding a balance between fighting the misuse of social media and protecting the ideals of freedom of expression.
Meanwhile, Musk is securing up to $4 billion in funding for xAI, an AI startup that introduced open source chatbot Grok.
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