Elon Musk’s best idea for stopping spam bots is to charge you for additional Twitter DMs

Twitter will “soon” introduce daily limits on the number of direct messages unauthenticated accounts can send “in an effort to reduce spam,” the company announced Friday through his Twitter Support account. In other words, to send unlimited DMs, you need to pay for a Twitter Blue subscription.

In its tweet, Twitter did not specify what the daily DM limit might be. On a support pagethe company said the changes would be implemented from Friday.

The link goes to a Twitter Blue subscription page.
Screenshot of Jay Peters / The Verge

But a month later, he said the then-ongoing Twitter acquisition was “temporarily on hold” while he awaited details to support Twitter’s calculation that bots/spam make up only less than five percent of monthly active users; days later, he claimed the deal “cannot move forward” until Twitter proved the estimate. The acquisition eventually went through later in the year.

Twitter was introduced last week a DM setting which the company said was also intended to help reduce spam, but like this news, it’s also another way to push Twitter Blue. If you have your DMs open, the new Twitter setting will move DMs from verified users you don’t follow to the secondary “message request” inbox instead of your main inbox. But that change, which Twitter switched everyone with an open DM inbox to, also disables the ability for people who don’t pay for Twitter Blue to message you completely. You can switch back to allowing message requests from anyone, but you need to know where to look.

A few weeks ago, Musk also set “temporary” speed limits on tweet reading, and under those limits, Twitter Blue subscribers were able to read far more tweets than unauthenticated users. It’s unclear if those rate limits are still in place.