The next time you log into Twitter, your inbox might look a little different.
Twitter is adding a new message setting to reduce the amount of spam you get in your direct messages from paid Verified accounts (presuming your DMs are open).
With the new “quality filter,” messages from people you follow will show up in your primary inbox as normal, while messages from Verified users who you don’t follow will appear in your message request inbox instead.
The change only applies to folks who have their Twitter inbox set up to accept messages from anyone. If your inbox is restricted to only accept messages from people you follow, everything will stay the same.
The move is intended to help combat a growing amount of spam that’s showing up in users’ inboxes via DM. Previously, anyone who had paid Twitter $8 per month for Verified status would also get priority access to your inbox, regardless of whether or not you followed them. At the time, those messages were likely coming from someone notable or legit, given that you couldn't yet pay for a blue checkmark. But that all changed once Twitter stripped blue checks from legacy verified users and let anyone with $8 become a "verified" user—and send you a DM.
This move doesn’t get rid of spam, it just moves it somewhere else, and that “Message requests” tab could include messages from people you actually want to speak to as well. In a way, the announcement confirms that Twitter is aware it has a Verified spammer problem.
If you accept a message from your Message Request tab, that conversation is moved to your primary inbox. The sender won’t know that you’ve seen the message until you hit that accept button, so if it’s something you want to ignore, you can do so and they’ll be none the wiser.
You can also delete messages from either inbox, but deleting those messages won’t prevent someone from sending you messages in the future. To get rid of a spammer for good, your best option is to block them.
The new quality filter setting will be on by default for users with open DMs. If you want all your messages to show up in your primary inbox regardless of who they come from, toggle the feature off by going to “change settings” at the top of your Requests tab. You can also toggle the quality filter off from the Privacy section of your Message settings within Twitter.