Elon Musk, the CEO of Twitter, has announced some changes to the platform’s paid subscription service, Twitter Blue.
Starting from April 15th, only verified subscribers will have their posts recommended to other users and be able to participate in polls. The new policy means that tweets from non-paying accounts will not be displayed in the “For You” section of recommended tweets.
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Recently, the company announced that it would remove the verified status of some “legacy” accounts that existed before Musk’s ownership. Users currently pay $8 per month for blue-tick verification, which also gives them access to extra features.
According to Musk, these changes are necessary to address the issue of advanced AI bot swarms taking over the platform.
Given that modern AI can solve any “prove you’re not a robot” tests, it’s now trivial to spin up 100k human-like bots for less than a penny per account.
Paid verification increases bot cost by ~10,000% & makes it much easier to identify bots by phone & CC clustering.
Obvious…
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 27, 2023
He believes that paid verification significantly increases the cost of using bots and makes them easier to identify. However, some social media users have criticized the move.