I think that whole deal is more about conditioning people to pay, even a small amount, until asked for more. I highly doubt it has anything to do with bots. Some might say it’s to gather IDs - which could be true as well but I’m not sure what the “market” for that looks like. Plenty of other ways to find IDs like leaked credit scores. Twitter audience isn’t even that big compared to other platforms. I’m inclined to believe it’s for conditioning.
Discussion
Elon is trying to make a business of it. That’s what Twitter really is. We learned a lot what we are looking for as a society and I am hoping we can do that with #nostr
Yes bots are total strawman. Also agree with getting people to pay. But that just happens to come with positive government identification, and I refuse to believe anything like that is simple happenstance. There is a huge difference psychologically as well as in courts, in terms of acceptable engagement of authority, when dealing with positive government identification versus identification obtained through surveillance.