Elon Musk is preparing to do away with legacy authentications on Twitter and has announced a new feature for users who choose to pay for Twitter Blue.
Aside from a blue check mark verifying that users of the social media platform are paying for the service, Musk tweeted that “Starting April 15, only verified accounts will be eligible for recommendations from For You.”
Musk added: “[This] is the only realistic way to deal with advanced AI bot swarms taking over. Other than that, it’s a hopeless losing battle. Voting in polls requires verification for the same reason.
The “For You” tab is the algorithm-based feed Twitter delivers to its users, offering a mix of content from accounts people follow, as well as recommended tweets. Musk says only tweets from paid subscribers are recommended by the algorithm to other users.
Twitter Blue costs $11/month for users who subscribe as an in-app purchase on their phone. However, the plan is reduced to $7/month if users sign up on the web.
In Musk’s announcement, he also mentioned that only paid subscribers would be able to vote in polls. It is worth noting that in December 2022, Tesla’s CEO conducted a poll asking users if he should resign his CEO duties on the social media platform. The results were not in Musk’s favor with over 57% of users voting against him.
Days later, he would finally acknowledge that he had lost the poll and claimed he would honor the results, but gave no timetable for when he would keep his word.
Last week, Twitter announced that on April 1, they would “start phasing out our deprecated verified program and removing obsolete verified checkmarks.” They invited users with blue check marks to sign up for Twitter Blue to keep their badge or they would lose it.
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