Elon Musk said on Monday only verified Twitter accounts would be eligible to vote in polls starting April 15, a move that the social media company’s CEO believes will address advanced AI bot swarms.
CEO Elon Musk has announced that Twitter polls would only be open to verified Twitter accounts starting from April 15. This decision aims to combat the issue of advanced AI bot swarms.
He also said only verified accounts will be eligible to be in Twitter’s For You recommendations, which displays a stream of tweets from accounts on Twitter.
“Starting April 15th, only verified accounts will be eligible to be in For You recommendations. This is the only realistic way to address advanced AI bot swarms taking over. It is otherwise a hopeless losing battle. Voting in polls will require verification for same reason..” CEO Musk tweeted.
“That said, it’s ok to have verified bot accounts if they follow terms of service & don’t impersonate a human,” he added.
Elon Musk on Monday also said that paid verification increases the cost of bots by 10,000 per cent and makes it much easier to identify bots by phone, so paid accounts will be the only social media that matters.
“Given that modern AI can solve any ‘prove you’re not a robot’ tests, it’s now trivial to spin up 100k human-like bots for less than a penny per account. Paid verification increases bot cost by 10,000 per cent and makes it much easier to identify bots by phone and CC clustering,” Musk tweeted.
“Obvious conclusion: paid account social media will be the only social media that matters,” he added.
Many users expressed their views in response to Musk’s post.
“I’ve noticed some accounts have, say, 130k followers one day, and 90k the next…and keep going up and down. Is it due to bots?,” a user commented.
“We’ve already found a way around this. And it’s automated. And able to scale very easily,” another user said.
Meanwhile, Musk has announced that Twitter will remove all legacy Blue verified checkmarks for both individual users and organisations from April 1. Twitter Blue in India will cost Rs 9,400 a year for individual users.