New chapter of Elon Musk's strange decisions in Twitter. This time, the CEO of the social network said that Twitter will only display verified accounts in the algorithmic “For You” timeline starting April 15.
In a tweet, Musk justified the move by saying it was the "only realistic way to deal with advanced robot artificial intelligence". Of course he said nothing about the new measure promoting the purchase of verified accounts.
Although Tesla's CEO said the move to ban unverified accounts from recommendations was to counter bots, he mentioned that 'verified' non-human bots will appear on 'For You' timeline. So essentially you have to be a verified user, brand, or government official for Twitter's algorithm to recommend you.
Twitter has been trying to push the “For You” timeline for some time despite negative user reviews. The move to make the algorithmic timeline only for verified accounts will also be unpopular.
Specifically, analysts report that Twitter only has 385.000 paying users right now, and the company removes all legacy verification flags from older accounts from April 1st. So the algorithmic timeline will be filled with paid accounts.
Musk also mentioned that from now on only verified accounts will be able to participate in polls.
