Starting April 15th, only verified accounts will be eligible to be in For You recommendations. The is the only realistic way to address advanced AI bot swarms taking over. It is otherwise a hopeless losing battle. Voting in polls will require verification for same reason.
That said, it’s ok to have verified bot accounts if they follow terms of service & don’t impersonate a human
Mar 27, 2023 · 11:54 PM UTC
Elon Musk (@elonmusk)
Starting April 15th, only verified accounts will be eligible to be in For You recommendations. The is the only realistic way to address advanced AI bot swarms taking over. It is otherwise a hopeless losing battle. Voting in polls will require verification for same reason.
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9to5Mac’s Take
Musk’s claim that restricting the reach of tweets from unverified accounts or even preventing them from voting in polls is the only way to stop bots is simply a lie. Right now, anyone with a valid phone number can get the blue checkmark by paying for Twitter Blue. Twitter never asks for a government ID to actually check if that person is the real owner of that account.
Twitter’s verification system has never been perfect. However, in the past, eligible users had to prove their identity by submitting an ID and other evidence of their notability to confirm who they are. Twitter Blue’s verified badge is not proof of identity. It’s a proof of status. And it won’t stop bots or fake Twitter accounts.
At this point, Musk is simply desperate to make money from Twitter. After all, the company is now valued at $20 billion, while he paid $44 billion for it in October. As the owner of Twitter, Musk can do whatever he wants with it. But his arguments to justify the latest changes are extremely questionable.
In the meantime, he continues to fire key engineers and executives while the platform faces constant outages, serious bugs, and even security breaches. As an old Twitter fan, it’s simply too sad to watch it burn.