Twitter has reversed course on plans to limit presence on its “for you” timeline to paying users only, with Elon Musk claiming he “forgot to mention” that other users would also be visible.
When the company’s owner first announced the plan on Tuesday, it said it would limit the tab that algorithmically selects tweets so that users only show accounts that paid £8 a month for “Twitter Blue” and linked their account to a working phone number.
Musk said restricting it to those subscribers, who will be the only “verified” users on the site after Twitter shuts down its “legacy” verification program on Saturday, was “the only realistic way to approach control of advanced bot swarms.” of AI”.
However, the announcement was met with backlash from many users, and later that day Musk he said in a second tweet:: “I forgot to mention that the accounts you follow directly will also be in For you, since you have explicitly requested them”.
Since its launch under Musk, as a rebranded version of the pre-existing “recommended” feed, the for you tab has proven controversial. It has more aggressive curation than its predecessor, regularly inserts tweets from accounts the user doesn’t follow, and has a strong penchant for sending tweets from a small number of featured accounts to as many feeds as possible: like Men’s Fashion Commentator @dieworkwear, conservative commentator Ben Shapiro and nearly all of Musk’s own public posts.
The stated justification for limiting the tab for you to paid accounts only was to prevent “bot swarms” from taking over it. Musk has focused on the prominence of automated spam accounts since before he even bought the site, citing spam as one of the key reasons he wanted to acquire it, and later citing spam itself as one of the reasons why that he should be allowed to renege on the deal.
However, his focus accelerated in late December after he published a “binding” survey asking whether he should step down as director of the company. In 24 hours, more than 10 million users had voted in favor of his resignation, 57.5% of the total votes.
The next day, Musk broke his silence only to tweet the word “interesting” to several suggestions that the poll results were skewed by fake accounts and to agree with a suggestion that only paid accounts should be able to vote in the polls. surveys. . That policy is on track to be introduced on April 15, Musk said in a tweet on Tuesday.
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Musk has yet to confirm any plans to step down as director of the company.
