Twitter says users must be verified to access the ‘new’ version of TweetDeck

According to a tweet from Twitter’s support account, Twitter is officially launching its “new” version of TweetDeck to everyone but here is the potentially-heartbreaking catch: TweetDeck is going to become a Verified-only feature in 30 days, the account says, meaning you’ll need to pay for a Twitter Blue subscription to be able to use it.

This updated version of TweetDeck has been in preview for nearly two years.

Charging for TweetDeck, which was previously free and is widely used by businesses and news organizations to easily monitor content, could bring a revenue boost to Twitter, which has struggled to retain advertising revenue under billionaire Elon Musk’s ownership.

The move comes just days after Musk said that both verified and unverified users would have a limited number of posts they could read per day “to address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation.” Musk implemented a read limit of 1,000 tweets per day for non-verified users and 10,000 for verified users.

His announcement sparked a fierce backlash from users on Twitter, and ad experts said it would undermine new CEO Linda Yaccarino, who started in the role last month. Individuals must pay $8 (R150) per month to verify their account, while organizations pay $1,000 (R18,774) per month.

Twitter has been testing a new version of TweetDeck for a few years now, and finally, under the new management, it is rolling out globally. In a TweetDeck Twitter community, a company employee said that to prevent scraping the company removed legacy APIs and which in turn affected the web app.

I can’t blame them, I remember not liking the TweetDeck Preview when I tried it out in 2021, so I don’t know how much the preview may have changed now that it’s officially released, and I hope Twitter has improved it for the better, but I’m not optimistic; Twitter’s TweetDeck account hasn’t said a word since August.