With Meta Verified, everyone gets a blue check… for a price
When Twitter started providing verified accounts early in startup, they made sense. Celebrities, public figures, journalists, these were all people who reasonably needed some level of protection for their identities, not just because of internet trolls, although this is always a problem, but to lend credence to it all. that is published that we can be mostly certain that the person tweeting was or represented that person.
Sure, the “My account was hacked” became ubiquitous when something nasty came out of tweets from a soon-to-be-deleted celebrity, but even then it helped track down the hacker (assuming there was one).
Ever since Elon Musk took over Twitter and released (later squelched) and re-released the new paid blue tick service, that former credibility has taken a major hit.
So it’s no surprise that Meta, Mark Zuckerberg’s venture that runs Facebook and Instagram, has come aboard the pay-for-your-blue-check brigade. Social media companies are looking for ANY way to monetize what appears to be a struggling if not endangered business model and adding subscribers to their already abundant user base is definitely one way to do that.
Twitter charges $11 a month while Meta is going with $12 or $15 depending on the platform. Discord, Reddit, YouTube, and others have added similar subscription models to their services, but they tend to offer additional services and features. Meta and Twitter can only really give you the tick and the promise that you’ll be more protected from online trolls (plus maybe some ad restrictions?).
The problem with the blue check for both services is that it’s not really doing much to combat people posing as others. Meta requires verified users to provide valid ID to prove they are who they say they are. This is useful, we suppose, but Meta has never been the hotbed of representation the way Twitter is. And Twitter doesn’t even require it. They just need you to be on Twitter for 30 days and some other pretty benign requirements.
All in all, it’s hard to see that this will do anything for anyone other than taking money out of their pockets for the benefit of a blue check that actually meant something on Twitter. The only thing that means now is that you have $15 a month to shell out for it.
