Twitter users will soon need to be verified in order to use the online dashboard TweetDeck, the company announced on Monday.
The popular and previously free tool allows users to organize the accounts they follow into different columns to easily monitor content. It has been popular with businesses and news organizations.
The new policy will take effect in 30 days, the company said in a tweet, and could bring a revenue boost to Twitter, which has struggled to retain advertisers under Elon Musk’s ownership.
The decision comes amid a number of drastic changes ordered by Musk, including requiring users to be logged on to the website to view tweets and limiting the number of tweets that can be viewed each day to 1,000 for unverified accounts.
Musk said the limited tweet policy was a “temporary emergency measure” made to discourage “extreme levels” of data scraping and “system manipulation” he claimed were affecting user experience. The executive had previously expressed frustration at artificial intelligence companies scraping data from social media platforms, including Twitter, to train their systems.
“We absolutely will take legal action against those who stole our data & look forward seeing them in court, which is (optimistically) 2 to 3 years from now,” he said.
In a letter addressed to the Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella, in May, Musk’s lawyer Alex Spiro asked the company to conduct an audit of its use of Twitter’s content, alleging it had violated an agreement over using the social media company’s data.
Twitter has also begun charging users to access its application programming interface (API), used by third-party apps and researchers. The company, which has largely dissolved its public relations department, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The TweetDeck change could be an attempt to push more users to the Twitter Blue program, through which users can pay for verification. The subscription service costs $11 per month in the US (on iOS or Android), £11 in the UK and $19 in Australia, and includes the blue checkmark, a demarcation previously free to politicians, journalists and other notable public figures.
The service attracted just 150,000 subscribers in its first weeks – a small portion of the platform’s global user base of nearly 400 million. As of 30 April, the number of paid subscribers had fallen to about 68,000, according to reports from Mashable.
Reuters contributed to this report
