Twitter will hide all tweets posted by non-subscribers from the “For You” feed

The news from CEO Elon Musk himself enshrines the transformation of free speech on Twitter into a privilege for which you have to pay between $7 and $11 a month, the cost of a Twitter Blue subscription. Otherwise, you can share as many tweets as you like, but they will only be seen by people who follow your account and expressly switch to the alternative content feed, Following.

“Starting April 15, only verified accounts will be eligible to be in For You recommendations,” Musk announced in a tweet published Monday evening.

According to him, the move whereby the platform’s algorithms will only allow viral tweets shared from accounts attributed to Twitter Blue subscribers, while ignoring non-subscribers altogether, is actually beneficial to everyone: “It’s the only realistic way to address advanced swarms of AI bots taking over. Otherwise, it’s a hopeless battle. Voting in polls will require verification for the same reason.”

In other words, instead of taking the battle to the next level by developing their own AI-assisted filters to combat the aforementioned swarms of AI bots, Musk assumes that the state actors and organizations behind these disinformation operations won’t afford to pay for the “tool that” provides them with immunity from most content filters and facilitates the rapid viralization of posts.

From the users’ point of view, the For You list is the main way to increase visibility and get information outside the existing circle of followers. With tweets ignored by the algorithms responsible for populating this list, unsubscribed users remain mere bystanders to the posts of Twitter Blue subscribers, with no real chance to “grow” their channel or pass on information, however useful they may be to the community.

Although he said Twitter is making the change to fight bot accounts, Musk appears to contradict himself in one of his immediately following tweets, “That said, it’s okay to have vetted bot accounts if they comply with the platform’s terms of use and don’t usurp someone else’s identity.”