As Musk notes, voting in Twitter polls can even turn out to be a Twitter Blue unique possibility, which is able to severely limit the attain of non-paying accounts, whereas additionally limiting common consumer performance.

Twitter’s additionally eradicating ‘legacy’ blue checkmarks later this week, which is able to imply that, as of April fifteenth, your Twitter feeds are going to look so much totally different, with the one blue ticks being from paying customers, and solely paying customers displaying up in For You feed suggestions.

You’ll nonetheless be capable of view tweets from the accounts you observe in your ‘Following’ tab, and also you’ll nonetheless be capable of see tweets from non-Twitter Blue accounts in different areas, like Discover traits. However it should restrict visibility, which may immediate extra accounts to pay up, and increase Twitter’s income consumption from subscriptions.

Twitter Blue, which, as of final week, is now obtainable in all areas, at present has round 450k subscribers, which equates to 0.18% of Twitter’s complete consumer base. The danger for Twitter is that this small group of customers can also be largely aligned with Musk, and his political and ideological stances, which may flip your For You feed into a really one-sided dialogue, in relation to political and world occasions.

That would flip numerous customers away – as a result of as Parler and varied different proper wing social media apps have proven, no person actually desires to interact in a partisan chatter fest. However manufacturers, specifically, do need visibility for his or her tweets, and perhaps, by proscribing their publicity based mostly on subscriptions, that’ll result in a giant uptake in Twitter Blue, which, by extension, as Musk notes, may assist to fight bots and spam within the app.

The logic right here is that spammers and scammers gained’t be capable of afford to pay $8 per account to run their schemes. Proper now, a scammer can arrange lots of of hundreds of Twitter accounts, freed from cost, then use these profiles to make sure opinions or angles pattern, amplifying no matter aspect of an argument they select to take.   

But when the vast majority of Twitter customers pay for verification, that may ultimately imply the one non-verified accounts will belong to spammers that may’t afford it. That, theoretically, will make these scams a lot simpler to determine – however to ensure that this to be a viable strategy, Musk will want actually excessive take-up of Twitter Blue, which, to date, just isn’t even near taking place.

Which is why Twitter’s now taking steps to make paid verification a factor.

Will that work? I’m tipping the vast majority of customers nonetheless gained’t pay, whereas the potential draw back is that it may make lots of people much less prone to tweet, and fewer prone to change over to the ‘For You’ tab, hampering discovery, and thus utilization.

However it looks as if Musk goes to seek out out for himself.

No less than he’ll know, definitively, if it is a workable possibility or not.