Elon Musk’s finest concept for stopping spambots is making you pay for further Twitter DMs

Twitter will “quickly” implement every day limits on the variety of direct messages unverified accounts will be capable to 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 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 adjustments could be applied starting Friday.

However a month later, he stated the then in-progress Twitter acquisition was “temporarily on hold” 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 “cannot move forward” till Twitter proved the estimate. The acquisition eventually went through later within the yr.

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

A couple of weeks in the past, Musk additionally instituted “non permanent” price limits on studying tweets, and below these limits, Twitter Blue subscribers may learn far more tweets than unverified users. It’s unclear if these price limits are nonetheless in place.