Twitter to restrict voting in polls to paid 'Blue' subscribers

On Monday, Twitter CEO Elon Musk said he would change the voting guidelines on Twitter polls to only those who subscribe to his Twitter blue service in an exchange with a user who claimed the results of Musk's poll asking if he should step down as leader of the company were influenced by bots and spam accounts.

The user Unfiltered Boss tweeted, "Blue subscribers should be the only ones that can vote in policy-related polls. We actually have skin in the game." Musk replied, "Good point. Twitter will make that change."

On Sunday, Twitter CEO Elon Musk ran an open poll asking, "Should I step down as head of Twitter? I will abide by the results of this poll." The poll received 17,502,391 votes and 57.5 percent of users voted "Yes" to Musk stepping down. 42.5 percent voted "no." 

Unfiltered Boss wrote, "Hey @elonmusk, it’s unwise to run a poll like this when you are now deep-state enemy #1. They have the biggest bot army on Twitter. They have 100k 'analysts' with 30-40 accounts all voting against you. Let’s clean up and then rerun this poll. The majority has faith in you."

"I’m hoping that Elon did this poll as a honeypot to catch all the deep-state bots. The dataset for this poll will contain most of them. Some good data mining and he could kill them all in one go," he added. Musk replied, "Interesting."

According to Fortune, "Twitter Blue is available only in the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the UK." Subscriptions start at $8 a month.

Ian Miles Cheong wrote, "While some people might cry about how this is like social credit (it isn’t) it’s actually close to what the Founding Fathers intended—only landowners could vote. It’s a good policy. Democracy must not become a tyranny of the mob."

"Crucially, Twitter Blue works like Voter ID. The fact of the matter is that anyone can make as many free accounts as they want and use that to influence polls unfairly for users who only voted once." he added.