Twitter announced on Monday that its users will soon need to be verified in order to use TweetDeck, Reuters reported.
The change will take effect in 30 days, the company said.
Twitter made the announcement in a tweet detailing an improved version of TweetDeck with new features. It was unclear if Twitter will charge users for both the new and old version of TweetDeck. Twitter did not immediately respond to request for comment.
Charging for TweetDeck, which was previously free and is widely used by businesses and news organizations to easily monitor content, could bring a revenue boost to Twitter, which has struggled to retain advertising revenue under billionaire Elon Musk's ownership.
The announcement is the latest in a series of controversial moves by Musk and comes days after he announced that unverified accounts in the Twitter Blue program (that do not pay for a monthly subscription) will be limited to reading only 600 posts per day, compared to verified accounts which will be able to read 6,000 posts per post per day. That number was later increased.
Musk explained that the reason for the move is "to deal with large volumes of information mining, or 'scraping,' and system malfunctions."
In a later post, Musk explained that the new limitations placed on Twitter usage are meant to combat addiction to social media and encourage people to look up from their phones.
"The reason I set a ‘View Limit; is because we are all Twitter addicts and need to go outside," Musk wrote in a tweet. "I’m doing a good deed for the world here. Also, that’s another view you just used."
In another post, he wrote, "You awake from a deep trance, step away from the phone to see your friends & family."
Previous controversial moves by Musk included changes to the blue checkmark. One of Musk’s first product moves was to launch a service granting blue checks to anyone willing to pay $8 a month, but the social media platform was quickly inundated by impostor accounts, causing Twitter to temporarily suspend the service days after its launch.
The relaunched service costs $8 a month for web users and $11 a month for users of its iPhone or Android apps.
In April, Twitter removed blue checkmarks from many high-profile users who did not pay the monthly fee to keep them.
Musk has also implemented an authentication scheme for users. In addition to blue checkmarks for individuals, the new scheme includes a gold checkmark for companies and a grey checkmark for government accounts.