Twitter is taking 'extreme measures' to tackle its bot problem. It should verify everyone instead.
- Twitter's latest meltdown is being blamed on bots.
- On Tuesday it said it took "extreme measures" to remove bots and ensure authenticity.
Remember when Elon Musk handed out free blue checks to some Twitter users after taking them away?
If you were a former blue check user like LeBron James, Stephen King, or Ian McKellen, you might have been lucky enough — or unlucky, depending on your perspective — to have been gifted one.
Musk might need to start gifting blue checks to everyone else too.
After a chaotic few days that saw Twitter restrict the number of tweets users could see, the company came out on Tuesday and said it had to make that decision, in part, because of a longstanding problem: pesky bots.
"To ensure the authenticity of our user base we must take extreme measures to remove spam and bots from our platform," Twitter said in a blogpost.
"That's why we temporarily limited usage so we could detect and eliminate bots and other bad actors that are harming the platform."
The only real explanation it could offer to users blindsided by the suddenness of the decision to limit Twitter usage was that "any advance notice on these actions would have allowed bad actors to alter their behavior to evade detection."
Solving this problem was a big part of Musk's promise when he upended the legacy blue-check model that he once described as a "lords and peasants" system in favor of Twitter Blue, a new regime requiring users to pay a monthly fee.
So why are bots still so rampant? It's simple: Twitter would rather incapacitate itself than recognize that most users don't want to pay for a basic function that they know Twitter should be responsible for.
Tackling some of the bot issues outlined by Twitter — such as "scraping people's public Twitter data" to build AI models like ChatGPT, as well as "manipulating people and conversation" — can really only happen if every account on the app is verified.
But Musk's online antics, combined with regular outages and unpopular decisions to change much-loved services such as TweetDeck, have made signing up for a blue check a frankly absurd thing to do.
Bloomberg reported in April that around 4% of people who went to the Twitter Blue sales site ended up subscribing to the service. Getting anywhere near 50% in the months ahead, let alone 100%, feels like a fool's errand.
Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino described last week's decision by the company to rate limit tweets temporarily as "meaningful and ongoing" work aimed at ensuring the "authenticity" of Twitter's userbase.
Authenticity will be even more important as Yaccarino and Musk chart a path towards Twitter 2.0 – a version of the company that aims to be "the world's most accurate real-time information source and a global town square for communication."
When announcing that ambition to Twitter employees last month, Yaccarino said "that's not an empty promise." The first step towards delivering on that? Verify everyone.