Twitter will exclude all accounts without paid verification from its algorithmic timeline

Twitter CEO announces verified accounts only on "For You" timeline starting April 15th.

Musk justified the move as a way to deal with "advanced AI bot swarms taking over." However, he mentioned that "verified" bots that don't impersonate humans are eligible to be shown on the timeline. This means that only paid users, brands, or government officials will be recommended by Twitter's algorithm.

The move is part of Twitter's efforts to promote its "For You" timeline, which has been met with negative opinions from many users. However, analysts suggest that Twitter only has 385,000 paying users at the moment, so the timeline will be filled with paid accounts in addition to brands and officials' accounts, making it a very skewed timeline.

Musk also announced that going forward, only verified accounts will be able to take part in polls. It is unclear if this applies to polls created by Twitter (or him) or all polls on the platform. Musk has previously promised that every major policy decision will go through a poll, but this has not been implemented.

This announcement comes after Twitter briefly instated a policy to ban handles and links to other social networks like Facebook and Instagram, which was later reversed due to heavy criticism. Musk has taken note of user suggestions to limit policy voting to only paying subscribers, and it seems that with this latest statement, he might be finally implementing this change.

It remains to be seen how this move will be received by Twitter's users and how it will affect the platform's overall user experience.