Elon Musk: Voting in Twitter polls will require verification from April 15

Elon Musk, chief executive officer (CEO) of Twitter, says voting in polls would require verification from April 15, 2023.

Announcing the introduction of new features in a tweet on Monday, the billionaire also said only accounts with the verified blue checkmark will be eligible for features such as ‘For You’ recommendations.

He said the decision would “address advanced AI bot swarms”.

Artificial intelligence bots are chatbots trained to have human-like conversations using a process known as natural language processing (NLP).

Musk has been obsessed with eliminating bots — also known spam accounts — on the micro-blogging platform since he bought Twitter last year.

“Starting April 15th, only verified accounts will be eligible to be in For You recommendations,” Musk tweeted.

“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 the same reason.”

Earlier this year, Twitter started promoting the “For You” timeline.

The feature is said to serves as a relief to many who had complained that the social network showed them the algorithmic timeline by default each time they visited the platform.

Also in an earlier tweet, the billionaire owner of Tesla had hinted that, “it’s ok to have verified bot accounts if they follow terms of service and don’t impersonate a human”.

This followed his reviews on the purpose of paid verification, adding that paid verification increases bot cost.

“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,” Musk said.

“Paid verification increases bot cost by ~10,000 percent and makes it much easier to identify bots by phone and CC clustering.

“Obvious conclusion: paid account social media will be the only social media that matters.”

Last year, the microblogging firm had launched an $8 monthly subscription service that includes a blue checkmark for subscribers.