It would seem that Elon Musk‘s vision for Twitter to be a true platform for free speech of any kind (hateful or otherwise) may not be quite as easy as he first envisioned. The owner of one of the world’s biggest social media spaces is now potentially putting something into plan that would favor only those with a verified account.
The new change that Musk tweeted about would see only verified accounts appearing in the For You recommendations, with anyone whose account is not verified falling by the wayside. In order to get a verified account you must have to have a subscription to Twitter Blue and be eligible according to Twitter’s guidelines.
In a tweet, Musk gave his reasoning behind this somewhat questionable decision to give some voices precedence over others. He believes that this is the only way to counteract AI bots that plague the site. Even polling on the site will only be eligible to verified accounts, hardly the democratic way to conduct decision-making.
Of course, perhaps the scourge of AI could be properly dealt with if Musk hadn’t slashed his workforce within an inch of its life. If making the platform safer is truly Musk’s intention, what’s to stop an entity from simply buying up a tonne of verified accounts to manipulate polls that way? Surely those who truly wish to destabilize results on the platform would have the means to do so, regardless of whether they need to use a verified account or not.
Twitter has been struggling financially for some time now, with Musk admitting that the company had lost value since he bought it up last year. With that in mind, this feels like a thinly-veiled solution to drive up Twitter’s subscription numbers, and we’re not so sure that users are going to be the biggest fans of this change.