Twitter is bringing recommended tweets to everyone. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
Twitter is bringing recommended tweets from people you don’t follow to all users, the company announced on Wednesday. Twitter is doing this because it wants to “ensure everyone on Twitter sees the best content on the platform,” so it’s expanding them even to people who “may not have seen them in the past.”
Recommended tweets appear in the “home” — or non-chronological — feed, which organizes tweets algorithmically. For me, the vast majority of those tweets are from people I follow, but every once and awhile I’ll see a tweet from somebody I don’t. I was under the impression that everyone saw recommended tweets, but based on Twitter’s update on Wednesday, people who don’t already see them now will.
We want to ensure everyone on Twitter sees the best content on the platform, so we’re expanding recommendations to all users, including those who may not have seen them in the past.
You can learn more about them, and how to best control your experience: https://t.co/ekYWf57JSc
— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) November 30, 2022
The change could help Twitter boost its user growth, which Elon Musk has already claimed has hit all-time highs since he’s taken over. Improved user statistics could be an important way to win back advertisers, though some of the biggest have recently distanced themselves from the social network.
With the change to recommendations, Twitter joins Meta in pushing more algorithmic content, and it marks Musk’s newest stamp on the platform. On his first day of owning the social network, Musk requested that Twitter.com show the Explore page for logged out users, and he’s working on relaunching the new Twitter Blue subscription that lets users pay for a blue verified check mark.
If you’d prefer not to see recommended tweets in your feed (I’m in that camp), you can switch to the “latest” timeline by clicking the sparkle icon at the top of the feed. But fair warning that you might still see recommendations in your notifications tab from time to time; they tend to show up there for me after I haven’t logged into Twitter for a couple days.