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Elon Musk says Twitter’s For You page will only recommend verified accounts

Elon Musk says Twitter’s For You page will only recommend verified accounts

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Voting in polls will also be limited to verified users.

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Elon Musk, with a background of Twitter badges
Illustration by Kristen Radtke / The Verge; Photo: Getty Images

Twitter users will need a “verified account” to get recommended on the platform’s For You page starting on April 15th, according to a Monday evening tweet from CEO Elon Musk.

Given that Twitter has promised to start dismantling the “legacy” verified system at the beginning of April, that appears to mean that you’ll have to be a company, government entity, or Twitter Blue subscriber if you want to pop into the feeds of people who don’t follow you. Musk clarified on Tuesday that accounts you already follow will show up in For You, too, “since you have explicitly asked for them.”

Musk claims the move is “the only realistic way to address advanced AI bot swarms taking over.” Verified users are also going to become the only accounts that can vote in polls for the “same reason,” Musk says.

It’s worth taking this announcement with a big grain of salt, as Musk’s tweets haven’t always turned into enforced policy or features. Perhaps the biggest example is his promise from February that the company was going to start sharing ad revenue with Blue subscribers, something that’s still MIA almost two months later. That same month, he also promised to open-source the company’s algorithm by March 5th, which hasn’t happened yet — though now he says it’ll happen on March 31st, without acknowledging the previous missed deadline.

Musk has made similar promises in the past. Before he dropped the charade of supposedly asking the community before making major changes to the service, he said that Twitter would only allow Blue Subscribers to vote in policy polls. It’s a bit of a moot point now that he’s not really doing those anymore, though.

Update March 28th, 3:57PM ET: Musk says that accounts you follow will show up in For You.