The Blue Check: Why the Elon Musk Blue Check Was a Mistake and Why You Shouldn’t Embate Its Role in Social Media

Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover has been chaotic since its slapdash inception, so it’s only fitting that his first change will scramble the platform’s social hierarchy.

After being forced to pull a feature due to fake accounts, the service was reborn in December. It is possible to get gold checks for companies, gray checks for government entities and other organizations, and blue checks for individuals whether or not they are celebrities.

Verification did help the platform operate as it did not cure fraud, lies, and other misinformation but it did make a number of mistakes over the years. There’s a reason why every other major social platform, including Facebook and TikTok, cribbed the blue badges for their own networks. They have been at least moderately helpful.

But the idea of the blue check as something you could buy to look cool misapprehends its appeal. Reducing the blue checks to straightforward, purchasable status symbols hampers their original function, which in turn will remove any non-dorky justification for having them. Now, when anyone can purchase the check, the authentication factor diminishes. There is only one left and that is the idea that these check marks give clout.

Why the Meta Badge is Changing for Accuracy: Why You Can’t Get Verified, But You Can Get a Free Subscription

How much money Meta can raise through verification is unclear. The Information reported that the platform has less than 300,000 subscribers, which would bring in less than 1 percent of Musk’s $3 billion goal. The Meta family of apps, including WhatApp and Facebook, have more users every month than they do.

The government ID that the customer needs to get the blue Badge has to match their profile name and picture. Users must be 18 years old to be eligible.

Meta made it clear there would be no changes to accounts that have already been verified. Users who are notable and authentic used to be verification’s priority.

The meaning of the blue Badge is being changed to focus on authenticity so that more people can be verified. We will show follower count in more places so that people can distinguish notable accounts from those that share the same name.

The price of a monthly subscription to the service for both phones and tablets is $11, part of the attempt by Musk to increase his business after buying the platform for $44 billion.

Additionally, users who sign up for the service will get exclusive stickers for Stories and Reels, and will also receive 100 free stars per month, or the digital currency you can use to tip creators on Facebook. Meta notes that businesses can’t yet apply for a Meta Verified badge and that you can’t change your profile name, username, birthday, or profile photo without going through the verification process all over again.

Meta writes in a post that they want to build a subscription offering that is valuable to both creators and businesses. “As part of this vision, we are evolving the meaning of the verified badge so we can expand access to verification and more people can trust the accounts they interact with are authentic.”

The Metaverse and Musk: How to Run a Social Media Platform with a Paid Verification Bundle? Comment on Matt Navarra

In Australia and New Zealand this week, it will cost just $19.99AUD on the web and $24.99AUD on the mobile, with a price of $23.49 NZD on the internet and $29.58 NZD on the mobile. The higher cost on iOS and Android is likely a way to offset the commission both Apple and Google take on in-app purchases.

Rumors about the service first surfaced earlier this month when a report from TechCrunch shared references to paid verification in Instagram’s source code. Matt Navarra posted a support page for paid verification on the Australian and New Zealand-based version of the popular photo sharing app.

The package has strong echoes of Twitter’s Blue subscription service, launched under new owner Elon Musk, who has been aggressively trying to find ways to monetize his platform—most recently, by telling users they won’t be able to use text-based two-factor authentication unless they subscribe.

Analysts say the move might be out of character for Meta, which recently laid off 11,000 workers and spent billions on its push into the metaverse, a technology with no clear business model.

Matt Navarra, the social media analyst who broke the news of the Meta change, says that Meta has seen other companies launch their own subscription plans. The idea of paying for features that used to be free has started to become normalized, he says. “The risk there is reduced for them in terms of whether it will be a success.”

Many people have threatened to leave the platform, although there is no reliable data on how many people follow through, because of the huge backlash to its attempts to make users pay for features.