As of April 15, the “For You” feed will only include accounts with a paid-for checkmark.
As of midway through this month, unverified accounts will no longer be appearing in the recommended “For You” algorithmic feed, according to an announcement CEO Elon Musk made last week.
Only accounts paying for the Twitter Blue feature will be included in the recommendations.
According to Elon Musk’s post that announced this change, recommending only tweets from accounts that have a blue badge and not unverified accounts is “the only realistic way to address advanced AI bot swarms taking over.”
Musk also used that same tweet to reveal that only those with blue verified badges will be able to vote in polls on the social media platform. He said this decision was made for the same reason. “It is otherwise a hopeless losing battle,” he claimed.
Musk previously said that the paid verifications help to weed out bots in unverified accounts.
He stated that the paid verification program makes using bots considerably more expensive, thereby making them easier to identify.
After a massive initial failure to successfully launch the Twitter Blue subscription program, it was relaunched in December. The only requirement Twitter has for receiving the blue checkmark was to spend the $8 subscription fee (or $11 if the subscription was being made through an iOS device). This meant that it became simple and affordable for impersonation accounts to be created and “verified” for celebrities, businesses, and other high-profile entities.
The latest version of the Twitter Blue program is meant to help prevent impersonations by requiring not only the subscription fee but also that the phone number be verified, and the account be reviewed.
If a subscriber wants to change their display name, username, or profile photo, they will temporarily return to the status of unverified accounts until it can be reviewed once more. That said, the social media company doesn’t require its subscribers to prove their identities with any kind of official identification to prove they are who they say they are or that they are permitted to represent a given brand or company. This has many people questioning Musk’s logic for allowing only those with a blue checkmark to be added to the “For You” tab recommendations.
