Twitter Tests Recent Restrictions on DMs to Combat Message Spam

After upping its efforts to combat general spam in user feeds, by prioritizing Twitter Blue users in content rankings within the app, Twitter’s now switching its attention to DM misuse, with a spread of latest measures designed to limit the ways in which messages will be used for mass sends, flooding inboxes with random junk that users then have to filter out.

First off, as we reported last week, Twitter’s testing out recent restrictions on DM sending, with Twitter Blue users soon set to be the one ones that’ll be allowed to send DM requests to users who don’t follow them within the app.

That’ll significantly restrict people’s capability to have interaction in DM spam – though it’ll also impact businesses using Twitter for customer support, and various others who use Twitter DMs to achieve out to potential contacts or collaborators.

After all, you’ll give you the chance to get around this, by paying $8 per 30 days, which Twitter maintains is a type of user verification, enough to weed out spammers not less than. And if more people get verified, more people can engage via DM, the impact is reduced, etc.

Elon Musk says that this recent element will likely be rolled out sometime this week.

Along with this, Twitter’s also trying to implement limits on the quantity of DMs that non-subscribers can send per day.

As you may see in this instance, shared by app researcher Alessandro Paluzzi, Twitter will soon stop users from sending any DMs once they reach a certain limit, with the present day by day limit, Paluzzi says, pegged at 500.

Which is quite a bit. In the event you’re sending 500 DMs per day, you almost certainly needs to be paying – but Paluzzi also notes that this number may very well be much smaller once this restriction is eventually rolled out.

The combined measures will significantly impact DM spammers – though they too may even give you the chance to pay the $8 per 30 days, and carry on sending. I assume, the danger here is that they get reported, and lose their verification in consequence – or Twitter makes money from such either way, so it becomes less of an issue for Elon and Co.

But it surely should work to scale back DM spam, which may very well be one other step towards each improving the messaging experience within the app, while also prompting more people to enroll to Twitter Blue, a win-win for Twitter itself.

As noted, that will produce other, unintended impacts, depending on how you utilize DMs. But Twitter’s response can be to push users towards Twitter Blue, which Elon Musk maintains is one of the best solution for addressing Twitter’s spam and bot issues.

Which it probably is not, but when more people do join, it has the potential to deal with several of Twitter’s challenges in a single measure.

Twitter needs more revenue, with Twitter’s overall ad revenue down 40% year-over-year, while it also desires to diversify its income streams, so it doesn’t should implement moderation and censorship on the behest of ad partners (ad revenue still makes up around 90% of Twitter’s income). After which there’s the verification element. Proper verification would involve confirmation of identity via Government-issued ID, but that also requires manual checking, and thus, additional labor time, so Twitter’s using what it calls ‘payment verification’ as a proxy for ID confirmation – i.e. if a user has a phone number, and a connected checking account, it should be an actual person, while bot armies can be harder to construct in the event that they should pay for every account.

In theory, all of this is sensible. In point of fact, nonetheless, not enough persons are paying for Twitter Blue to make this an efficient option.

Immediately, around 0.28% of Twitter users have signed onto this system, which is nowhere near enough to make this a viable solution on any of those fronts. But Twitter’s sticking with it – though a more practical solution would likely be free verification, via government-issued ID, versus having to pay for such.

LinkedIn’s trying to implement this via a third-party provider, which is able to reduce manual checking and confirmation on its end. That’ll likely see quite a bit more take-up, though it’s still a heap of manual work, and Twitter, immediately, has less capability for such than ever, with around 80% fewer staff than this time last yr.

So it’ll have to stick to Twitter Blue as its verification stream, for now not less than, which is able to see it proceed to implement recent measures like this to make the app less functional for non-subscribers, within the hopes that more of them will just pay and be done with it.

I doubt that’s going to occur, but not less than Twitter will know, a method or one other, whether it is a workable solution in the long run.

In other Twitter DM news, it’s also increasing its group chat limit from 50 to 100 people.

The broader social media trend towards messaging interactions, versus public posting in feeds, has prompted every app to reconsider its messaging elements, and Twitter can be hoping that a much bigger group DM limit will provide more capability for discussion – while Elon also recently agreed with a user suggestion that Twitter Circles needs to be culled in favor of higher DM tools.

Looks as if that may very well be the subsequent thing on the Twitter chopping block.