Elon Musk’s greatest thought for stopping spambots is making you pay for additional Twitter DMs

Twitter will “quickly” implement every day limits on the variety of direct messages unverified accounts will be capable of ship in “an effort to cut back spam,” the corporate introduced on Friday via its Twitter Support account. In different phrases, to ship limitless DMs, you’ll must pay for a Twitter Blue subscription.

In its tweet, Twitter didn’t specify what the every day DM restrict could also be. On a support page, the corporate stated the modifications can be applied starting Friday.

However a month later, he stated the then in-progress Twitter acquisition was “briefly on maintain” whereas he waited for particulars to assist Twitter’s calculation that bots / spam solely accounted for lower than 5 % of its month-to-month energetic customers; days later, he asserted that the deal “can not transfer ahead” till Twitter proved the estimate. The acquisition finally went by later within the yr.

Final week, Twitter launched a DM setting that the corporate stated was additionally supposed to assist cut back spam — however like this information, it doubles as one other technique to push Twitter Blue. When you’ve got your DMs open, Twitter’s new setting strikes DMs from verified customers that you simply don’t observe into the secondary “message request” inbox as an alternative of your foremost inbox. However that change, which Twitter switched everybody with an open DM inbox over to, additionally turns off the flexibility for individuals who don’t pay for Twitter Blue to message you at all. You’ll be able to change again to permitting message requests from everybody, however it’s important to know the place to look.

A couple of weeks in the past, Musk additionally instituted “short-term” fee limits on studying tweets, and beneath these limits, Twitter Blue subscribers might learn way more tweets than unverified customers. It’s unclear if these fee limits are nonetheless in place.