Twitter Blue Will Soon Be Required For Polls And ‘For You’ Recommendations – SlashGear

Musk argues that limiting recommendations to posts from verified accounts is “the only realistic way to address advanced AI bot swarms taking over. It is otherwise a hopeless losing battle.” As well, Twitter users will only be able to vote in polls if they have a Blue subscription, according to Musk, who says the goal of quashing bots is the same motivation behind that change. 

Of course, a verified badge no longer means what it did in the pre-Musk era. Before the billionaire paid $44 billion to buy the company and became its CEO, Twitter only offered a verified badge to accounts that were important or notable — or, to put it another way, accounts that were important enough that a scammer would want to impersonate them and, therefore, a blue badge was required to highlight their authenticity.

Under Musk’s ownership, however, Twitter is selling verified badges as the key perk of its Twitter Blue subscription, which starts at $8 per month. The company will take back the verified badge from all legacy accounts and starting April 1, only the accounts that pay the Twiter Blue tax will be able to keep the verified checkmark. It’ll only be a couple of weeks later that the For You recommendations will be solely filled with posts from paying users, and that alone, of course, is not a guarantee that you’ll see meaningful and high-quality content.