Twitter's For You feed will soon only show tweets from verified users
Twitter's feed is receiving yet another shake-up
➡️ The Shortcut Skinny: Twitter For You
📣 You’ll soon need to be a verified Twitter user if you want your tweets to reach the masses
🐤 From next month, only tweets from verified accounts will appear on the platform’s algorithmic For You feed
💰 It looks like yet another way of driving users to the Twitter Blue subscription service
📆 The change will be implemented on April 15
Twitter will begin prioritizing the tweets of paid subscribers from next month, as users will need a verified account for their posts to appear in the platform’s For You feed.
In a tweet, CEO Elon Musk said: “Starting April 15th, only verified accounts will be eligible to be in For You recommendations.”
Introduced earlier this year, the For You feed is an algorithmic category that shows content from users that you follow plus tweets that Twitter reckons you’ll enjoy based on your past behavior. Although it is the default feed, you can switch to the Following tab to only see tweets from accounts you have chosen to follow.
Musk went on to claim the new policy, which effectively rewards members of the platform’s revamped Twitter Blue subscription with greater exposure and user engagement, as necessary for fighting bots.
“[This] is the only realistic way to address advanced AI bot swarms taking over,” he said. “It is otherwise a hopeless losing battle.”
Verified users will also be the only ones able to vote in polls “for [the] same reason”, said Musk.
Musk has introduced a wave of changes to Twitter since taking over the platform last year. Most recently, a new bookmark counter was rolled out which publicly records how many people had saved a tweet to their bookmark folder for later viewing. It’s similar to the view counter that was added to tweets last year, in the hope of showing that the platform is more alive than it may seem.
Before that, the ability to write very, very long tweets was introduced (again, only for Blue subscribers) and an ad-free subscription tier was floated as yet another way to wring revenue from the platform.
These upcoming changes to the For You feed will give users another incentive to subscribe to Twitter Blue, although I’m not convinced it will persuade many. $8 a month for minor platform benefits that used to be completely free is by no means cheap. Right now, Twitter Blue is simply locking features away from users, rather than providing additional benefits to the free service.