Elon Musk’s best idea for stopping spambots is making you pay for extra Twitter DMs

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

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

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

Final week, Twitter launched a DM setting that the corporate stated was additionally meant to assist cut back spam — however like this information, it doubles as one other approach to push Twitter Blue. When you’ve got your DMs open, Twitter’s new setting strikes DMs from verified customers that you just don’t observe into the secondary “message request” inbox as an alternative of your essential 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 in any respect. You may change again to permitting message requests from everybody, however it’s a must to know the place to look.

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