This is a new chapter of Elon Musk and his strange decisions on Twitter. This time around, the CEO of the social network has stated that Twitter will only show verified accounts on the “For You” algorithmic timeline starting April 15.
In a tweet, Musk justified the move by saying this is the “only realistic way to address swarms of advanced AI bots taking over.” While the Tesla CEO suggested the move to ban unverified accounts from recommendations was to address bots, he did mention that “verified” bots that don’t impersonate humans are eligible to show up on the “For You” timeline. “. Basically, you have to be a paid user, brand, or government official to be recommended by the Twitter algorithm.
Twitter has been trying to promote the “For You” timeline for a while now despite negative feedback from many users. The move to make it a verified-only algorithmic feed won’t be a popular decision either. Notably, analysts suggest that Twitter has just 385,000 paying users right now. Additionally, the company will remove legacy verification checkmarks from previously notable accounts on April 1. So the algorithmic feed will be populated with paid accounts as well as brand and official accounts, making for a very skewed timeline.
Musk also said that in the future only verified accounts will be able to participate in the surveys. But it is not clear if these are polls created by Twitter (or by him) or all polls on the platform. As always, the announcement is confusing.
Last year, Twitter briefly instituted a policy to ban identifiers and links to other social networks like Facebook and Instagram. The move failed, and after heavy criticism, the company repealed the rule. At that time, Musk saying that every major political decision would go through a poll (Spoiler: it hasn’t). Shortly after, he launched a poll asking people if he should step down as CEO. At the end of it, 57.5% voted in favor.
After these facts, several people suggested that bots accounted for many of these votes. At the time, Musk took note of a user’s suggestion to limit voting policy for paying subscribers only. With the last statement, you may finally be implementing this change.
This development comes days after GitHub removed the leaked source code from Twitter. In addition, Musk promised to open the social network’s recommendation algorithm on March 31. We’ll have to wait and see if the code is referenced to limit it to verified users only.
