Twitter to boost verified accounts in For You recommendations

Twitter 20 written on a darkened background of a town square

Elon Musk, the CEO of Twitter, has announced that only verified users – those people who pay $7 a month for a blue check mark – will be included in people’s personalized For You feed. In addition to this, voting in Twitter polls will also require users to be verified. This latter change will shrink the voter base of polls on Twitter so it’ll be interesting to see how much they’re used by people going forward.

According to Musk, these measures are being taken as the “only realistic way” to address “advanced AI bot swarms” from taking over. The company will be hoping that this move adds to the list of reasons that a user would want to pick up a Twitter Blue subscription. The changes come in on April 15.

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.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 27, 2023

Two weeks ago, Musk took to his Twitter account to announce that the code behind recommended tweets would be open-sourced on March 31 as it’s apparently one big mess and the company would like assistance to sort through and clean it up. If you’re wondering why anyone would possibly help do this, contributing to public source code can be a good way to improve your own programming skills.

Musk said at the time that the company was also working on a new approach to serving more compelling tweets but that it was still a work in process. The new For You feed could be what Musk was referring to earlier in the month.