X Updates With A Feature To Receive Comments from Verified Accounts Only

Twitter was once a place where users can speak whatever they want, to anyone.

But following Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter, and after the company is renamed to X, the billionaire has made various of changes and tweaks. And this time, yet another feature has arrived.

The feature, which is essentially an added perk to X Premium users, is allowing users to limit replies to their post to only verified accounts.

Before this, users already had settings to limit replies to 'Everyone,' 'People you follow,' and 'Only people you mention.' This time however, the platform has introduced another option that allows users to limit replies to verified users.

The option is available in the 'Who can reply?', and can be found in the settings of individual posts.

Previously, paid subscribers of X get features like post editing, undoing posts, and longer posts and videos.

Among others, they also see half ads, prioritized in rankings in conversation and search, text formatting, custom icons and custom navigation, and more.

And more importantly, paying users have that verified, but controversial checkmark.

The 'Who can reply?' feature, which adds to the existing settings to control who can reply, literally means that certain posts cannot be replied by unverified users of X.

The new feature is part of Elon Musk's vision to make X an "everything app" that's centered in audio, video, messaging, payments/banking, and a global marketplace for ideas, goods, services, and opportunities.

Ever since his acquisition of Twitter in October last year. Musk has said he's concerned about bias in Twitter's algorithm and has been bringing massive transformation, including changing its name to X and launching paid verification allowing only users who pay to get verified blue tick.

But again, certain Twitter features Musk introduced can be discriminating.

And this 'Who can reply?' feature is one of them.

There’s an argument that limiting replies to verified accounts could reduce harassment, trolling, and misinformation.

The thing is, anyone can be a verified users, even bots.

And since X already prioritizes replies from verified accounts, it’s easy to see how misinformation can thrive if paid checkmark posters agree to populate certain posts.

So here, it seems that the feature is limiting unverified accounts to express themselves.

While X wants the feature to make X a more appealing platform for users, 'Who can reply?' is just like some other X Premium features, in which it's essentially a "pay to win mode".

X has said that it's working to address this issue by developing new ways to verify accounts and to make it easier for users to identify misleading accounts. However, some people are concerned that the 'Who can reply?' feature restricting unverified users in some way might actually fuel the problem.