Meta slash Facebook announces its own subscription service – Meta Verified – allowing users to finally speak to customer support and yes, get a blue verified badge.
On a Facebook post this week, Mark Zuckerberg announced that those who sign up to Meta Verified will receive additional impersonation protection and access to customer support, as well as a verified blue tick.
Whether it was inspired by Elon Musk’s Twitter or not, one can’t help notice some similarities between Meta Verified and Twitter Blue. Most noticeably users can pay to display the verified blue tick by their names.
We gave Twitter a hard time when they announced they were selling off the blue tick to anyone willing to pay a few bucks a month, given the blue tick is often used as a Cybersecurity trust signal. And those cybersecurity worries were soon realized after the Twitter platform’s “blue tick for hire” model was quickly being exploited by spammers and crooks impersonating big brands and celebrities, causing a tidal wave of confusion.
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It’s worrying to see Meta and Facebook/Instagram go down a similar route as well, but it’s important to note a few differences here, demonstrating that perhaps Facebook has learned from Twitter’s mistakes.
Firstly, Meta isn’t going to strip the blue tick from notable accounts, like Twitter said they would do. Doing so would make it increasingly difficult to determine if an account is a real well-known person or an impostor.
Secondly, and most importantly, with Meta Verified, users will need to provide a copy of their official government ID (passport, driver’s license) to join (yes, we cannot help but baulk at the idea that the company most renowned for mishandling personal customer data now wants you to pay them to send them your ID).
These two differences are aimed to help keep up the notion that the blue tick can still be used to determine if an account belongs to a real person or a cyber-crook/spammer. But it relies on Meta being able to stop bad actors from “gaming” the Meta Verified platform – a front on which their reputation is rather poor.
It’s worrying for us. If we had a nickel for every time we’ve offered the advice of “check if the account has a verified blue tick”, we’d be rich. But with Twitter and now Facebook, it’s advice we won’t be offering nearly as much or as prominently.
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Zuckerberg also said that those accounts that subscribe to Meta Verified will inherently get better imposter protection because Meta can “more effectively find and remove any imposter accounts since we know which account is the real [user]”
We suppose that does make sense, but given Meta and Facebook’s beyond-dreadful history of protecting accounts and inability to remove blatant scammers and spammers, this really does feel like Meta asking users to pay money for a relatively basic level of security – security that should really be a core product feature.
Of course it’s also another demonstration of how the Internet overall is increasingly becoming a pay-to-play environment, with ad revenue seemingly not sufficient any longer to keeping many core services free of charge, and that is ostensibly at odds with the core values that cyberspace was originally built upon.
Meta Verified will cost $11.99 (£9.96) a month on web, or $14.99 for iPhone users, and will initially roll out to users in Australia and New Zealand this week.
And finally – one inevitable result of this move will be that it will induce another wave of the “copy this post to keep Facebook/Meta free” hoaxes. Like we’ve said numerous times, Facebook is free, although now of course there is a paid-for option.