New Delhi (India), 28th March 2023: Only verified Twitter accounts will be permitted to vote in public polls beginning on April 15, according to Elon Musk, the CEO of the social media platform, who thinks this will stop advanced AI bot swarms. However netizens believe this is yet another attempt by the CEO to charge users and generate revenue.
Additionally, Musk mentioned that only verified accounts would be included in Twitter’s For You recommendations, which shows a stream of messages from accounts.
Last year, Musk had said Twitter would restrict voting on policy-related polls to paying Twitter Blue subscribers.
The Twitter CEO made the announcement public through a tweet from his official account. It read, “Starting April 15th, only verified accounts will be eligible to be in For You recommendations. This 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..”
Musk justified his move by stating that introducing a paid service increase the cost of bots by 10,000 per cent and hence they become easily identifiable and can be easily eliminated. Further he added that soon only paid accounts would be the social media that matters.
He tweeted, “Given that modern AI can solve any ‘prove you’re not a robot’ tests, it’s now trivial to spin up 100k human-like bots for less than a penny per account. Paid verification increases bot cost by 10,000 per cent and makes it much easier to identify bots by phone and CC clustering.”
