Elon Musk, the new Twitter boss recently announced a shake-up of the app’s paid Twitter Blue feature. This meant that for accounts that are subscribed, there will be some new improvements. It appears that starting on April 15, only verified accounts will be able to vote in polls and have their posts recommended to other users. In order to clarify this, the “For you” reel section of suggested tweets will not contain posts from non-subscribing accounts.
The firm said last week it would be removing the verified status of a few “legacy” accounts. These, according to the statement, are those from before Elon Musk bought the social media site.
Users must currently pay $7 (£5.70) per month for the blue-tick verification status. These users can now access the app’s extra features thanks to this. Musk stated that these modifications are the only practical response to the rise of advanced AI bot swarms. Otherwise, he called it a hopeless losing battle.
“Voting in polls will require verification for the same reason,” he added.
Earlier, Mr. Musk explained that if paying requires verification, using bots becomes significantly more expensive. This, therefore, makes it easier to identify them.
Despite Musk’s “good” intentions, the move has been criticized by many social media users. The Twitter Blue initial launch in November 2022 turned out to be very chaotic. This is because people impersonated big brands or celebrities and paid for the blue tick to look authentic. Some users even impersonated Twitter CEO Elon Musk. This ultimately forced the company to pause the feature after less than a week and then relaunch it the following month.
