Elon Musk has today shared a couple of drastic changes coming to Twitter’s “For You” tab, that may not entice non-verified users.
Starting April 15th, Twitter will only show the tweets from verified accounts on For You tab, instead of showing anyone’s as now. Also, the ability to vote in polls is limited to verified accounts! Musk says this latest change is to combat the bots on the platform.
Recommending Only Verified People
If you’re following the saga of Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, the only major roadblock that made Musk extend the drama are bots. While the ex-CEO Parag Agarwal has been arguing the count to be less than 5%, Elon Musk and his team argue the number to be way bigger than that.
Anyhow, he took over the company and now enacting policies to counter these bots. One among these is the latest changes coming to For You tab, where Musk says only the tweets from verified accounts will be shown to users!
Starting April 15th, only verified accounts will be eligible to be in For You recommendations.
The is the only realistic way to address advanced AI bot swarms taking over. It is otherwise a hopeless losing battle.
Voting in polls will require verification for same reason.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 27, 2023
This could be controversial, since For You tab is a recommending section of popular tweets that you may like, and the new change could be suppressing the tweets from any important accounts just because they didn’t have a verified badge.
Aside from this, Musk also says that the ability to vote on others polls will only be restricted to verified users. The new CEO cites combating bots as the reason for these changes and that would be helpful. Both these changes will be coming from April 15th onwards.
While we don’t know how helpful these could be, users on the platform aren’t quite happy about it already. Many have expressed their thoughts against Musk for forcing them to buy the Blue subscription – costing $8/month, and even more, if buying through iOS/Android apps.
This subscription is the only way one can get a verified badge, to stay fairly visible on the platform. Well, Musk has a history of withdrawing changes based on negative feedback, so we wait to see how these new policies proceed to happen.
