Twitter announced on Monday that yet another feature on the social network would be locked behind its paid Twitter Blue service.
The news was buried in a statement announcing “a new, improved version of TweetDeck” — the Twitter feature which has for years allowed users to manage multiple Twitter accounts using one interface.
“We have just launched a new, improved version of TweetDeck,” the statement said, before adding that TweetDeck “now supports full composer functionality, Spaces, video docking, polls, and more.”
While some users expressed enthusiasm over the update, others noticed a small disclaimer buried at the bottom of Twitter’s statement: “In 30 days, users must be Verified to access TweetDeck.”
To become verified on Twitter, users must pay a monthly subscription fee. Therefore, TweetDeck will become inaccessible to those who refuse to pay for Twitter Blue within 30 days.
Twitter employees told the Verge that “all users will be forced to switch over to the new version” of TweetDeck, whether they want to or not, and that they will not have the option of using the older, broken version of the feature for free.
It became necessary for Twitter to update TweetDeck after the feature was broken by Twitter owner Elon Musk’s decision to remove legacy APIs, which he claimed was necessary as part of his war against “data scraping.”
Since Musk’s 2022 purchase of Twitter, and his subsequent decision to launch the Twitter Blue subscription service, many features have been locked behind a paywall, including verification, text formatting, and even SMS two-factor authentication.
One of Twitter’s most controversial changes, the implementation of a tweet view limit, was rolled out last week and allowed paid Twitter Blue subscribers to view more tweets than regular users.
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