First part of the process is making an email. Seems simple enough EXCEPT all major free email addresses require you to setup a secondary email to verify your primary email and if you don't, chances are you can't use this email to verify your account for account creations.
This is obviously done in hopes that you link an email that is linked to you in your verification step. This has nothing to do to ensure protection or get rid of automated accounts because it's easy for automation to do this secondary step.
So, you're forced to create two new emails from two different email providers and cross-link them.
Once that's done, you've got to setup your X account which is a nightmare in itself because their new "confirm you aren't a bot" thing is garbage with 10 questions you have to answer. It took me two tries to get it but since I took so long, it didn't properly load when I got it and I was forced to do it two more times to get it. That's answer 40 questions to prove you aren't a robot.
The irony is my X account got banned for being a bot even though I've never used a botting program ever and I don't even use AI to post.
They don't need money as much as they need total control of information and data on every person that expresses or views ideas.
That's true of our enemies, but not everyone with power is an enemy, and even enemies are not perfectly aligned. The first mover on letting people pay some small but sufficiently-painful-to-a-botnet amount of money to avoid the now completely human-impermeable net of shadowbans will get a website of pure human training data, better engagement, more valuable ads, and more users.
Elon, for instance, wants all of these things and is demonstrably willing to make people angry. Someone should pitch him the idea of selling "Twitter not-bluecheck-but-I-am-verifiably-human-forevermore" cards at Walmart next to the MMO membership cards.
Elon has a bunch of baby mommas and they are all Jewish. He's an aspiring jew. His kids are Jewish. He is not ourguy.