The CEO of Meta, Mark Zuckerberg, joyfully announced the arrival of their brand-new membership service, Meta Verified. Users may exchange a prized blue badge for access to premium services by displaying it as proof of their identity on Facebook! “Extra impersonation protection against accounts claiming to be you,” and “direct access to customer support,” He said this in his sermon on Sunday morning.
“This new feature is about increasing authenticity and security across our services,” Zuckerberg wrote.
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If bought online, the service will cost $11.99 per month, or $14.99 if purchased offline “users subscribe through the company’s apps on iOS and Android,” based on the tech site Engadget. “The subscription will cover both Instagram and Facebook accounts.”
Last week, Mark Zuckerberg said that the initiative will begin operating in Australia and New Zealand, with plans to soon expand to other nations.
Rumors that Meta might be providing a paid verification service reportedly started earlier this month, according to Engadget. “when reverse engineer Alessandro Paluzzi discovered code referencing ‘paid blue badge’ and ‘identity verification.’
“On early Sunday morning, social media consultant and former Next Web reporter Matt Navarra found that Meta had published an Instagram support page detailing the subscription, only to later take it down before Zuckerberg’s Instagram post,” the report said.
The controversy surrounding Elon Musk’s recent revelation that “blue checks” must pay for their “verified” Twitter status has not yet reached the same level. This service had previously been free to use, however as of November there is now a $8 monthly charge. What will the public say? Time will only tell!
According to the BBC at the time, Musk said the additional cost was “essential to defeat spam/scam.” He added that “paid users would have priority in replies and searches, and half as many advertisements.”
Criticism raised worries that the “move could make it harder to identify reliable sources.”
The former head of global policy communications for Twitter, Nu Wexler, presented an unusual idea to the BBC: charging users a monthly subscription for verified accounts. This would be a cutting-edge strategy for monetizing social media sites and building secure user interfaces that go beyond conventional verification. “make it harder to spot disinformation.”
“With disinformation as an issue that a lot of platforms are struggling with, verification is one of the ways that journalists, academic researchers and some users use to filter out disinformation or low quality information,” Wexler said.
He added, “If you’re offering up blue checks for rent, it makes it harder to sift through disinformation and find high quality information.”
Keep an eye out for more developments as this story develops.
