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

Twitter will “soon” implement daily limits on the number of direct messages unverified accounts will be able to send in “an effort to reduce spam,” the company announced on Friday via its Twitter Support account. In other words, to send unlimited DMs, you’ll need to pay for a Twitter Blue subscription.

In its tweet, Twitter didn’t specify what the daily DM limit may be. On a support page, the company said the changes would be implemented beginning Friday.

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

But a month later, he said the then in-progress Twitter acquisition was “temporarily on hold” while he waited for details to support Twitter’s calculation that bots / spam only accounted for less than five percent of its monthly active users; days later, he asserted that the deal “cannot move forward” until Twitter proved the estimate. The acquisition eventually went through later in the year.

Last week, Twitter introduced a DM setting that the company said was also intended to help reduce spam — but like this news, it doubles as another way to push Twitter Blue. If you have your DMs open, Twitter’s new setting moves DMs from verified users that you don’t follow into the secondary “message request” inbox instead of your main inbox. But that change, which Twitter switched everyone with an open DM inbox over to, also turns off the ability for people who don’t pay for Twitter Blue to message you at all. You can switch back to allowing message requests from everyone, but you have to know where to look.

A few weeks ago, Musk also instituted “temporary” rate limits on reading tweets, and under those limits, Twitter Blue subscribers could read far more tweets than unverified users. It’s unclear if those rate limits are still in place.

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