Elon Musk, the owner of X (formerly known as Twitter), has announced that users involved in engagement farming will be suspended from the app.
News About Nigeria gathered that in a post shared on X on Friday, Musk made it clear that accounts engaging in engagement farming practices will be identified and suspended.
“Any accounts doing engagement farming will be suspended and traced to the source,” he wrote.
Engagement farming means the practice of creating and disseminating sensationalised, controversial, or clickbait content to get likes, comments, shares, or other forms of engagement.
This gives visibility, attracts followers, or amplifies the reach of one’s profile or content.
This strategy may also involve the use of bot accounts to artificially inflate engagement metrics on posts.
Musk has been actively implementing various measures to combat the prevalence of bots on X.
On April 16, Musk confirmed plans to introduce charges for new users to post on the platform, citing it as a necessary step to address the bot issue.
Musk said he is considering implementing “a small fee for new user[s]” to tackle the issue of automatised accounts, or “bots”.
No details regarding how much the fee would be or its implementation date have been disclosed but Musk said that the measure would last three months in another post on X.
Currently, the only paid features for X are for premium subscribers, which give access to the monetisation programme, an ad-free version, access to X’s generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) chatbot, and more reply visibility.
