Elon Musk’s Proposed Twitter Changes Revive Debate on How to Quash Spam

Twitter currently verifies certain users free of charge and indicates their status with a check mark. The company also has a subscription product called Twitter Blue that gives users who sign up for it access to premium features, such as the ability to organize tweets into bookmarked folders and some custom settings. It doesn’t include identity verification, though. Mr. Musk has suggested that verification would become part of the new subscription program he has proposed, tweeting Wednesday: “If verified accounts violate terms of service, eg spam/scam/impersonation, they’ll be suspended, but Twitter will keep their money!”

Some Twitter users and social-media specialists said subscriptions would throw up a barrier to verification, which they argued could make it harder to know which accounts are real and which aren’t. Others said Mr. Musk’s proposal would be more accessible than Twitter’s current verification model, in which the company determines who should be verified.

The world’s richest person also tweeted that his proposed subscription model would help stamp out bad actors, though he provided little explanation about how it would do so.

Tweeting this week about a subscription option, Mr. Musk said, “It is the only way to defeat the bots & trolls” and that he would “explain the rationale in longer form before” the program is implemented. The remarks were in response to a tweet from author Stephen King, who wrote that he wouldn’t pay to keep his check mark. “If that gets instituted, I’m gone like Enron,” the author wrote.

People who have studied spam and fake accounts say quashing them from social-media platforms is highly challenging because they can be replaced quickly after being shut down. Such researchers describe the issue as a whack-a-mole problem, because bad actors are constantly updating their methods.

Verification isn’t a perk of the company’s current Blue subscription, which costs $4.99 a month and lets users edit tweets and more. Twitter verifies people it deems authentic, notable and active at no cost, according to its website. Twitter didn’t respond to a request for comment about Mr. Musk’s proposal.

For now, Twitter’s check marks help users tell the difference between bogus accounts and ones operated by real individuals, according to

David Lazer,

professor of political science and computer and information sciences at Northeastern University. If adding or retaining the feature suddenly costs money, and celebrities and others choose not to pay for it, it could become confusing, he said. “You will have more fake accounts pop up and the normal user won’t have a way to differentiate” between those and legitimate accounts, he added.

For a subscription program to fight spam and malicious bots, Mr. Musk would need to ensure that bad actors can’t buy verification or other features, said

Alexandra Cirone,

an assistant professor in the government department at Cornell University. “A pay-to-play blue check system could lead to an increase in trolls impersonating high-profile figures,” she said in an email, adding that part of Twitter’s attraction has long been that users can follow high-profile figures such as celebrities and politicians.

Spam and fake accounts, which are in many cases generated by computer programs, or bots, are a longstanding industrywide challenge. Such accounts have been used to promote scams, deceptively attempt to influence political activity or achieve other illicit goals. The accounts can also make it harder for advertisers on social-media platforms to judge what they are getting for their money. Impersonating others with the intent to deceive isn’t allowed on Twitter, though parody accounts are.

Mr. Musk said the subscription program would cost $8 a month, with the price adjusted depending on the country. He said subscribers would get access to features including fewer advertisements and the ability to post long video and audio clips.

Charging for verification could help reduce some of the spam and fake accounts on the platform, according to

Chris Pierson,

chief executive of cybersecurity company BlackCloak Inc. and a former member of the Department of Homeland Security’s privacy committee and cybersecurity subcommittee. “The $8 serves as a barrier to entry to large-scale abuse by one actor,” he said. “Some criminals won’t do that because now they’re leaving a payment trail.” He also said only nation-states and other well-funded operators could likely afford to pay for the feature en masse.

Charging for verification could solve the problem of Twitter employees seemingly giving priority to the process for allotting check marks to users of their choosing, said Eric Wilson, a Republican digital strategist. As of now, “it’s very skewed toward mainstream institutions,” he said. “The uproar is about the power dynamic, who decides what accounts are worth verifying.”

People would likely pay for verification if it comes with other attractive features, which could help reduce spam accounts by making unverified accounts less trustworthy, Mr. Wilson said. He isn’t convinced, though, that Mr. Musk will go ahead with the change just yet. “You have to test it,” he said. “We’re having a real-time crash course in product development.”

Twitter has estimated that spam and fake accounts represent fewer than 5% of what the company calls monetizable daily active users, though the company has also acknowledged that metric is only an estimate.

Not all of the ideas Mr. Musk has floated on Twitter in the past have come to fruition. In 2018, for example, he said he was considering taking private electric-vehicle maker

Tesla Inc.

That never happened.

Already, Mr. Musk appears to have changed his mind about how much to charge for Twitter’s Blue subscriber offering. Shortly after the deal closed, staffers were instructed to raise the price to $19.99 a month from $4.99, according to the internal company correspondence viewed by the Journal. But on Tuesday he tweeted: “Power to the people! Blue for $8/month.”

Write to Sarah E. Needleman at [email protected] and Alexa Corse at [email protected]