Elon Musk’s Twitter tenure has been mostly disastrous since he gained the reins in Oct. 2022, but rival social media company Meta look set to follow one of his worst ideas which nearly broke the site.
Cast your mind back to the heady days of Nov. 2022 when Musk introduced perhaps the dumbest idea to hit Twitter: Paid verification. The scheme which resulted in new waves of misinformation and scams barely lasted in its original format before Musk had to admit defeat (not in his words) on the feature. Meta saw this and will be introducing the same paid verification scheme for Instagram and Facebook.
Mark Zuckerberg posted the news in an update for Instagram, describing this (stunningly) as a move to increase “authenticity and security across our services”, which feels incredibly naïve. The scheme will set users back $11.99 a month on web versions, and $14.99 on iOS, with Meta using some interesting prerequisites to prevent impersonation of public officials.
Meta will require the user to be 18 years old, reach the minimum account activity, and submit a government ID that matches their name and photo. Yes, this is from the same company behind the Cambridge Analytica scandal and may or may not be actively monitoring your conversations. Definitely trustworthy enough to give your government ID to.
Facebook and Instagram are inundated with bot accounts just like Twitter, and it seems the latter hasn’t seen much improvement in bot activity since Musk took over. Paid verification will not address the real issues with these websites, and will work as just another way of raising revenue.
Meta has seen declining profits since 2021 as well as mass lay-offs since. Paid verification comes just prior to another expected scything of its staff in March 2023. Meta can publicly say this is about increasing accountability and authenticity, but it looks not too dissimilar to Twitter Blue being a way for a company hemorrhaging money to start getting a portion back.