Elon Musk’s Twitter is increasingly becoming unusable for users who aren’t paying for the company’s $8 per month Twitter Blue subscription.
On Monday, the soon-to-be former CEO said that an update “coming this week” will limit the ability to send direct messages to people who don’t follow you on Twitter, making it available only to paying subscribers.
Musk’s tweet, which came as a response to another tweet claiming that the update is on its way, said that we can expect this to “hopefully” happen “this week.”
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“Twitter is working on limiting the ability to send DMs to people who don’t follow you to Verified (Blue) users only. Also applies to creating group chats,” said a tweet by T(w)itter Daily News(opens in a new tab).
Musk explained that this is about solving the problem of spam bots, which he pledged to fix before he bought the platform in April 2022.
“As I’ve said many times, it is increasingly difficult to distinguish between AI bots. Soon, it will be impossible. The only “social networks” that survive will be those that require verification. The payment system is a means of verification that increases bot cost by ~10,000X,” he tweeted.
Notably, Twitter already offers the possibility to automatically reject all DMs that aren’t coming from people you follow, making it fairly easy for many users to fix this issue. I’ve had it on since forever and never had problems with bots DMing me.
This latest change will likely cause problems for journalists who aren’t subscribed to Twitter Blue, as sending a DM to someone to that doesn’t know or follow you is quite commonly done when you need to ask permission to use content, request an interview, or fact check a story.
As T(w)itter Daily News suggested(opens in a new tab), it would be easy to add an option to users to remain open to DMs from non Twitter Blue-accounts. Otherwise, like many recent changes, this will seemingly be just another way to drive people to cough up for the Twitter Blue subscription.
Twitter Blue offers significant perks to subscribers, including the ability to edit tweets and post longer tweets. But one recent change has severely limited the reach for non-subscribers, while another made SMS-based two-factor authentication an option for Twitter Blue users only.
Meanwhile, a recent Wall Street Journal(opens in a new tab) report revealed that Musk’s fight against spam on Twitter isn’t going all that well, with bot activity being roughly the same as it was before his tenure on Twitter.
