This is a new chapter for Elon Musk and his bizarre Twitter decisions. Now, the social network’s CEO has declared that starting April 15, Twitter will only show verified accounts in its algorithm’s “For You” timeline.
In a tweet, Musk justified the move by stating that it is “the only real way to deal with the dominance of swarms of advanced AI bots.” Tesla’s CEO suggested the move to ban unverified accounts from recommendations was to deal with bots, but ‘verified’ bots that don’t impersonate humans are on the ‘For You’ timeline. I said I was eligible to be shown. So basically, you have to be a paying user, brand, or government official to be recommended by Twitter’s algorithms.
Twitter has been trying to promote its “For You” timeline for some time despite negative feedback from many users. Not a decision. In particular, analysts suggest Twitter only has 385,000 paying users at the moment. In addition, the company said he will remove the traditional verification checkmarks for previously highlighted accounts on April 1. As such, algorithmic feeds are filled with paid accounts on top of brand and affiliate accounts, resulting in a highly skewed timeline.
Musk also said that going forward, only verified accounts will be able to participate in voting. However, it’s unclear if it’s a poll made by his Twitter (or him) or all the polls on the platform. As usual, the announcement is confusing.
Last year, Twitter briefly introduced a policy prohibiting handles and links to other social networks such as Facebook and Instagram. The move backfired, and after heavy criticism, the company overturned the rule.Musk then Said All major policy decisions end up going through polls (spoiler: they don’t). Soon after, he launched a poll asking people if they should step down as CEO. In the end, 57.5% voted yes.
After these events Several people Suggesting that bots account for many of these votes. That’s when Musk took notice of a user’s suggestion to limit it. Policy to only vote for paid subscribersWith his latest statement, he may have finally implemented this change.
The development comes days after GitHub removed Twitter’s leaked source code. Additionally, Musk promised that he would open source the social network’s recommendation algorithm on March 31st. You should check if your code contains any reference to restricting to verified users only.
