Twitter says paying Blue subscribers now get ‘prioritized rankings in conversations’

Twitter has updated its list of features for Twitter Blue, saying subscribers paying for the $8-a-month service will now get “prioritized rankings in conversations” and the ability to upload videos up to 60 minutes in length.

Twitter owner Elon Musk has long promised to make Twitter Blue users more visible on the site. In November he said subscribers would get “Priority in replies, mentions & search, which is essential to defeat spam/scam,” and earlier this month the company repeated this promise, saying Twitter Blue will offer ”priority ranking in search, mentions, and replies.”

An update to the company’s Twitter Blue support page (spotted by TechCrunch; compare to older version here) says these priority replies are now in effect, though it doesn’t reference priority in search or mentions. The company doesn’t offer detail on how the feature works, saying only: “This feature prioritizes your replies on Tweets that you interact with.”

Presumably, though, it mean that when ordering replies to a Tweet, Twitter will now weight whether or not the user pays for Blue alongside other apparent factors like the time the tweet was posted and its popularity. Earlier this month, Twitter support said the feature was intended to “lower the visibility of scams, spam and bots,” though some have worried that paying for priority might also give bad actors an easy way to boost their messages.

In addition to prioritized replies, Twitter Blue subscribers can now upload videos up to 60 minutes long, 2GB in size, and 1080p resolution. This feature is only available via the web, and Twitter warns in a support page that it may have to modify “the resolution and bitrate of the original video while streaming based on the speed and stability of the viewer’s internet connection.” Other existing features for Blue subscribers include bookmark folders, a reader interface for long threads, and the ability to briefly “undo” tweets.