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

Twitter will “quickly” implement day by day limits on the variety of direct messages unverified accounts will have the ability 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 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 mentioned the modifications could be carried out starting Friday.

However a month later, he mentioned 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 p.c 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 means of later within the 12 months.

Final week, Twitter launched a DM setting that the corporate mentioned was additionally meant to assist cut back spam — however like this information, it doubles as one other solution 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 observe into the secondary “message request” inbox as an alternative of your fundamental 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 in any respect. You may change again to permitting message requests from everybody, however you need to know the place to look.

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