Not a day goes by when we don’t wonder if Twitter would be better off without Elon Musk as its owner and president. Despite no longer being the CEO of the company, he still makes the decisions, and that has become synonymous with disaster.
The latest twist on the X platform, formerly known as Twitter and led by Elon Musk, is that users can now block unverified accounts from responding to their posts.
This change comes about 11 months after Musk introduced paid verification for Twitter Blue, assigning blue verification labels to individuals willing to pay $7.99 per month.
It also means it could be harder for those who don’t pay for the service (with the exception of accounts required to be verified) to refute misinformation, which researchers say has continued to rise.
The excuse: “I don’t want to talk to bots”
There is an argument that limiting responses to verified accounts through payment, phone numbers, or even government identification could reduce harassment, trolling, and misinformation.
However, that argument quickly falls apart, either due to the continued presence of verified bots or with a quick look at the current state of the platform.
As X already prioritizes responses from verified accounts, it is easy to assess the quality of threads populated by posters with paid verification badges. One response to X’s post announcing the feature, from “Dave the reply guy,” cheerfully called it “pay to win mode.”
Undoubtedly, Elon Musk’s goal is to make all Twitter users pay, thereby making the social network profitable. However, in order to achieve this, he is dismantling everything that made Twitter gain hundreds of millions of daily users.
We’ll see; time is proving him wrong with every decision.
