SoatDev IT Consulting
SoatDev IT Consulting
  • About us
  • Expertise
  • Services
  • How it works
  • Contact Us
  • News
  • July 13, 2023
  • Rss Fetcher

As Twitter fends off new competition from Instagram Threads, the company today announced a change designed to cut down on spam in users’ inboxes. Starting “as soon as” July 14, Twitter will introduce a new messages setting aimed at reducing spam in DMs by moving messages from Verified users you don’t follow back to your “Message Request” inbox instead of your main inbox. Only messages from people you follow will arrive in your primary inbox going forward. Notably, these changes will also now apply to everyone who have their inboxes open to allow messages from anyone.

Previously, people would only be able to message you via Twitter DMs if you had opted into an option to receive messages from anyone through Twitter’s Settings or if the senders were Verified users (meaning they pay for a Twitter subscription) and you had specifically opted into receiving Direct Messages from Verified users.

Additionally, people could Direct Message you if you had first sent them a Direct Message at some point in the past.

Starting as soon as July 14th, we’re adding a new messages setting that should help reduce the number of spam messages in DMs. With the new setting enabled, messages from users who you follow will arrive in your primary inbox, and messages from verified users who you don’t follow…

— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) July 13, 2023

The change to move messages from Verified users back to the Message Request inbox instead of the primary inbox (unless you follow them), signals another failure of Twitter’s new verification system where users can pay for the blue badge that gives them elevated status on the platform. Before becoming pay-to-play, verification indicated a person was a public or notable figure of some sort — like a politician, celebrity, athlete, journalist, or other well-known individual. By making the Verified checkmark accessible to anyone who had a credit card to buy it, Twitter diluted the value of verification.

That apparently escalated to the point that people have become bothered by Verified users spamming their main inbox, when they had set it open to receive DMs from the blue-badged crowd. In other words, it’s a tacit admission that Twitter has a Verified user spam problem.

Twitter notes that if users still want to receive DMs from Verified users in their main inbox, they can manually switch back to that setting at any time after these changes are put into place.

The update will also make it more difficult for journalists to contact sources for more information or permission to use a tweet, as they not only lost their verification badges under Musk, but now — even if they now pay to be Verified — will have their DMs dropped into the Message Requests folder, where they may remain unseen.

As some users pointed out in the replies to Twitter’s announcement, the update doesn’t actually cut down on spam — from Verified users or otherwise — it simply relocates those messages to a different folder.

Elon Musk had proclaimed that reducing spam and bots on Twitter would be one of his major objectives after buying the social network for $44 billion last year. However, The Wall St. Journal recently reported fake and spam accounts remain a persistent problem on the platform. By at least one measure of bot activity, the degree of bot activity has remained the same after Musk’s takeover, the report also noted.

Musk, meanwhile, claimed last month Twitter eliminated at least 90% of scams and spam on Twitter.

 

 

Twitter admits to having a Verified spammer problem with announcement of new DM settings by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch

Previous Post
Next Post

Recent Posts

  • 2025 will be a ‘pivotal year’ for Meta’s augmented and virtual reality, says CTO
  • Why investing in growth-stage AI startups is getting riskier and more complicated
  • Anthropic appoints a national security expert to its governing trust
  • AI startups continue fueling San Francisco’s office recovery
  • Tesla’s Optimus robot VP is reportedly leaving the company

Categories

  • Industry News
  • Programming
  • RSS Fetched Articles
  • Uncategorized

Archives

  • June 2025
  • May 2025
  • April 2025
  • February 2025
  • January 2025
  • December 2024
  • November 2024
  • October 2024
  • September 2024
  • August 2024
  • July 2024
  • June 2024
  • May 2024
  • April 2024
  • March 2024
  • February 2024
  • January 2024
  • December 2023
  • November 2023
  • October 2023
  • September 2023
  • August 2023
  • July 2023
  • June 2023
  • May 2023
  • April 2023

Tap into the power of Microservices, MVC Architecture, Cloud, Containers, UML, and Scrum methodologies to bolster your project planning, execution, and application development processes.

Solutions

  • IT Consultation
  • Agile Transformation
  • Software Development
  • DevOps & CI/CD

Regions Covered

  • Montreal
  • New York
  • Paris
  • Mauritius
  • Abidjan
  • Dakar

Subscribe to Newsletter

Join our monthly newsletter subscribers to get the latest news and insights.

© Copyright 2023. All Rights Reserved by Soatdev IT Consulting Inc.