Twitter to promote only paying users’ tweets, Elon Musk announces

Twitter's feed will promote only the tweets of users paying its £8 monthly subscription service, Elon Musk, the site's owner and chief executive, has tweeted.

From 15 April, the "For you" tab on the site, which attempts to algorithmically curate popular posts for users, will feature only "verified accounts", Musk tweeted, describing the decision as "the only realistic way to address advanced AI bot swarms taking over".

Voting in polls on the site will also require verification "for same reason", Musk added.

From 1 April, existing users with verification badges on the site, now known as "legacy verified", will lose them unless they pay the monthly fee. A "verified account" will need to pay the £8 fee and provide a working phone number.

In 2022, Musk proposed requiring users to pay a fee to vote in polls, after a public proposal that he step down as chief executive of the site came to a surprise close with a large majority in favour of him quitting. Although he had initially promised the vote would be binding, in the hours after he began flirting with the idea that a large number of "bot" accounts had skewed the vote.

As well as the £8 monthly service for Twitter Blue, organisations have been offered a distinctive form of verification, which gives a yellow tick, with a price tag of $1,000 a month. That allows them to bestow further verification for their employees, for another $10 a month, while linking them back to the company.

Not everything is bad for the former Twitter elite, though. According to a report from the Platformer newsletter, Twitter still offers special service to a hand-picked list of 35 VIPs, including Musk himself, who are artificially promoted on the platform's algorithmic feeds.

The list includes a bizarre selection of power users from across American society, including the politicians Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Joe Biden, journalists Ben Shapiro, Matthew Yglesias and Glenn Greenwald, and the poster Dril, who once tweeted (in capitals): "If the zoo bans me for hollering at the animals I will face god and walk backwards into hell."

But the list was not created to boost the accounts, according to the report. Instead, it was assembled to help reassure Musk that algorithmic changes were not affecting his own reach. A cross-section of the platform's biggest accounts, it helped demonstrate which changes to the ranking system were meaningful, in the process increasing their engagement.