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 have the ability to ship in “an effort to scale back spam,” the corporate introduced on Friday through its Twitter Assist 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 help web page, the corporate stated the modifications could be applied starting Friday.

The hyperlink goes to a Twitter Blue subscription web page. Screenshot by Jay Peters / The Verge

However a month later, he stated the then in-progress Twitter acquisition was “quickly 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 lively customers; days later, he asserted that the deal “can’t transfer ahead” till Twitter proved the estimate. The acquisition ultimately 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 approach to push Twitter Blue. In case you have 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 predominant 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 possibly can change again to permitting message requests from everybody, however you need to know the place to look.

A number of weeks in the past, Musk additionally instituted “momentary” charge limits on studying tweets, and beneath these limits, Twitter Blue subscribers may learn way more tweets than unverified customers. It’s unclear if these charge limits are nonetheless in place.