Soon after Elon Musk arrived at Twitter headquarters in San Francisco in October last year, there was a backlash because he wanted to change the way the company functions. Being the outright owner of social network has allowed him to make several changes that have affected user experience. We look at some of the updates that have taken place over the last few months.

The Newsfeed

Since Elon Musk’s arrival at Twitter, the newsfeed has seen a substantial update. Earlier, it was a single flow of posts, showcasing the accounts that a user followed. Musk has split it into two — ‘For You’ feed and ‘Following’ tab. The former contains recommendations based on what you follow on Twitter and the accuracy of the feed continues to improve. Most of the time, users are now spending more time browsing through the ‘For You’ feed. It is also a clever way to highlight what content creators are up to. As for the ‘Following’ feed, it’s exactly what you expect it to be.

Checkmarks blue and beyond

Perhaps the most controversial update has to do with the blue checkmark that Twitter has popularised over many years. In the Jack Dorsey era, the blue checkmark was given out by Twitter to businessmen, celebrities, journalists and personalities who were deemed important by the company; there was no payment involved. Musk changed the way Twitter Blue works.

Now, you can subscribe to Twitter Blue for a monthly fee and get a verified checkmark. There were a few weeks when celebrities and important organisations lost their verified checkmark but many of them have been restored, especially those with more than a million followers. Further, Musk introduced other checkmarks, like gold that belongs to companies (comes for a substantial fee), company affiliation marks and official grey checkmarks for important public figures.

Labels and more labels

There are different types of labels. ‘State-affiliated media’, for example, is applied to media houses that don’t have editorial independence and it came under scrutiny when NPR was given the tag. ‘Government account’ is self-explanatory and so are ‘election candidates’. You can even have the fact that your phone number is verified displayed.

Doxxing policy

Musk has ensured that doxxing (revealing private details of other people) is not tolerated. Twitter has said: “When someone shares an individual’s live location on Twitter, there is an increased risk of physical harm. Moving forward, we’ll remove Tweets that share this information, and accounts dedicated to sharing someone else’s live location will be suspended.” The policy was implemented after an incident in which Musk’s young son was confronted by a stalker.

Overview of metrics

Before October 2022, one could like, retweet or reply to a post, following which the numbers of replies, likes and retweets showed up below a tweet. Musk is attaching more metrics, like a tally of how many times a post has been viewed or a tally of the number of times a tweet has been bookmarked and saved.

Long videos

It’s a Twitter Blue feature that has immense potential. Subscribers can upload videos that run for up to two hours. At first, it was used by people to upload full-length feature films but that has been taken care of to a large extent. A few days ago, Apple used the feature to upload the first episode of the popular Apple TV+ series Silo before the season finale to make more people interested in the show. The move has been applauded across the board and more streaming services may make use of the feature in the near future.

Long-form tweets

The revamped Twitter Blue programme allowed subscribers to send out 10,000 character tweets and now that has been increased to 25,000 characters (besides the ability to add four inline images).

Fact check for images

Originally introduced as Birdwatch, it became Community Notes under Musk, an attempt to curb the spread of misinformation. In May, Twitter expanded its crowdsourced fact-checking programme to include images. Contributors can add information specifically related to an image, and that context will populate below “recent and future matching images”.

Picture illustration: The Telegraph