MANILA, Philippines – X, formerly Twitter, on Friday, October 27, launched two new subscription tiers in addition to its older Premium plan: Basic and Premium+.

Basic starts at P165 per month, while Premium+ costs P880 per month. The original Premium, formerly called Twitter Blue, which gave subscribers a blue checkmark – once a signifier of a vetted, verified public personality, such as journalists, experts or politicians – cost P440 a month. 

A pricing chart on an X blog post showed different prices for using the platform on a different device. For example, a Premium subscription on the web app costs P440 while Android or iOS usage costs P600 a month. 

Each higher tier, as expected, offers more features. 

Below are key features for Basic subscriptions unavailable to non-paying members:

• Post editing, undoing posts
• Longer posts, longer videos
• A “small” reply boost 
• Two-factor authentication via SMS (non-paying users can use 2FA via security key or an authenticator app)
• Encrypted direct messages

Basic will still show ads to users, and do not provide a blue checkmark. 

Premium subscribers get all the Basic features plus a “larger” reply boost, a blue checkmark, half the ads a non-subscriber sees, and ad revenue sharing from posts.

Premium+ adds the “largest” reply boost.

The reply boost means a subscriber’s reply receives a boost that moves them further to the top of a thread, with Premium+ subscribers getting the biggest boost. Posts that subscribers interact with also receive a “small boost in their ranking.”

With Premium+ getting an even bigger algorithmic boost, the question would be how that would contribute to current trends wherein paying subscribers with the blue check marks have been found to be a top source of disinformation, in Israel’s massive retaliation after the October 7 Hamas attack. 

NewsGuard found that 74% of the disinformation in the conflict came from users with check marks, which have priority in the content algorithm. 

The new subscription tiers come after X launched the “Not-a-bot” program test in the Philippines and New Zealand, which requires an annual P42.51 yearly subscription for new users in the latter country. The joining fee is said “to bolster our already significant efforts to reduce spam, manipulation of our platform and bot activity” according to X. – Rappler.com