Still unsure about paying $8 for the Twitter Blue subscription tier? Worry not, Twitter CEO and owner Elon Musk has thought of another way to drive you into submission gently persuade you to get it.
According to Musk, Twitter verified accounts are now « prioritized. »
Musk didn’t elaborate further, and Twitter’s press service only replies with poop emojis to all our inquiries, so we’re not sure what this means, exactly. We’ve asked Musk on Twitter about the change and will update this post if he replies.
Musk could be talking about a previously announced change, in which he said that « only verified accounts will be eligible » to be shown in the For You feed. That’s Twitter’s default, algorithmically created view, and even though you can switch to see tweets from the people you’re following in chronological order, we assume most people default to the For You view.
This is a massive change, as it effectively means your tweets will be all but invisible unless you pay for Twitter Blue, the subscription tier that grants you the blue checkmark verification badge along with other perks, including the option to edit tweets as well as post very long tweets.
Musk later added a caveat to this, saying that tweets coming from non-paying, non-verified accounts will show up in your For You feed if you directly follow them. Still, the change will probably make it extremely hard for anyone with a non-verified account to significantly increase their follower count.
It’s worth noting that Musk originally said this change would go into effect on April 15, so it may have already happened. Perhaps the « prioritization » he speaks about simply means that tweets from verified accounts show up more often in people’s feeds; if so, the effect is similar and compounding with the change described above.
Musk may have also been talking about another previously announced change, in which he said that replies to tweets will be prioritized, so that you see replies from the people you follow first, followed by verified accounts, with unverified accounts coming last. He also said verified users will get priority in mentions and search results.
Musk’s Twitter has been playing cat and mouse with the Twitter Blue subscription, which Musk obviously sees as a key way to monetize Twitter. The company recently removed all the legacy blue checkmarks for non-paying users, only to start re-adding them to celebrity accounts free of charge.
