X Now Gives Free Premium Subscriptions to Accounts With Large Audiences

X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, has started giving free Premium subscriptions to users with a large following. As Elon Musk explained last month, you’ll need to have at least 2,500 “verified” subscribers (which means people who pay for X Premium) to be awarded a free Premium subscription ($8/month) and the blue checkmark that goes with it… whether you want it or not.

X Premium gives users the ability to edit posts and publish longer ones with up to 25,000 characters. The subscription also offers larger visibility for replies, longer video uploads, ads revenue sharing, and access to X Pro, the social dashboard previously known as TweetDeck.

Going forward, all 𝕏 accounts with over 2500 verified subscriber followers will get Premium features for free and accounts with over 5000 will get Premium+ for free

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 28, 2024

If you’re “lucky” enough to have over 5,000 verified subscribers, X will give you a free Premium+ subscription instead ($16/month). This higher tier includes all the features I mentioned earlier plus an ad-free experience (X Premium users only see half the ads), the largest reply boost, and the ability to publish rich-text articles directly on X.

While there’s currently no easy way to check your number of “verified” followers on X, the platform will notify eligible users once they’ve been awarded a free Premium subscription. However, the company will still have the right to cancel these complimentary subscriptions at any time.

If X is apparently doing this to give some recognition to “influential” members who wouldn’t pay for Premium on their own, this is likely not going to restore trust in a platform that has become even more toxic and filled with bots since Musk took over the company. The blue verified checkmark used to mean that profiles had been verified by humans… now it’s just something you can pay for or get for free if you have enough “verified” followers.

As for X’s ongoing bot problem, Musk just said today that “a system purge of bots and trolls” was underway. Whether it will make an actual difference remains to be seen.