Vector Blue Verified Badge
Alright, not everyone is verified, but a lot more “regular” people have that once-prestigious blue checkmark on Twitter and Instagram today than yesterday, while the notable people it was invented for have been stripped. You may notice this while scrolling on your phone the typical 150 times a day––like any average American, mindlessly captivated by your social media feeds, texts, headlines, and videos. Then you notice how someone you know passingly now has that blue checkmark, while a celebrity you follow does not.
In March of 2023, Meta started offering U.S. users paid subscriptions for verified Facebook and Instagram accounts, and Elon Musk’s chaotic timeline of Twitter’s verification protocols over the past six months likely played a role in the timing and rollout of Meta’s new offering, so we will focus the conversation here on Twitter and Instagram verification. What’s happening, and why should it matter to any of us?
Who used to get verified?
Until recently, anyone could go through a process to request verification on either platform by filling out a form within their apps. The process involved uploading a photo of your identification (such as a passport or driver’s license), along with submitting press links to support your notability. This original method still exists on Meta but not on Twitter. The purpose these blue checkmarks served was to help prevent imposter accounts from frauding and fooling the public. In 2008, Shaq was the first person to be verified on social media in order to combat accounts pretending to be him.
Whereas that sweet blue checkmark used to mean that you were really somebody, today, it is presumably being sullied in the gutter through its rushed monetization. As of this week, if you don’t pay Twitter, you could lose your legacy blue verification checkmark like Beyoncé and Ronaldo. In fact, most of the once-standard offerings on Twitter have been removed from accounts that don’t pay the monthly fee. If you don’t pay the subscription, you aren’t allowed to protect your account’s security with two-factor authentication, and you aren’t even allowed to run ads on Twitter. In short, if you decide not to give Twitter money every month, you aren’t allowed to give them more money through their ad platform.
How to get verified now?
On Meta, you can simply sign up like any subscription service and pay a monthly fee. For both Facebook and Instagram you’re looking at around $27 a month total. Meta’s process involves uploading your identification, so in that sense, they still earn the title of “verification,” while Twitter’s newest process is something of a poorly managed dumpster fire. Twitter’s new offerings include Twitter Blue for individuals at $8 a month, and Verified Organizations, which is currently priced at a staggering $1,000 a month. Payment is all that’s needed, as Twitter does not require any identification to actually verify your identity. The word “verification” on Twitter is now being used much more loosely.
Recent discussions on the topic of mass verification have mainly centered on the easily quotable statement that, “If everyone is verified, no one is verified.” In other words, the exclusivity of notability was the allure for many, and the point of such articles is to lay claim to how we were better off how things were before. The truth is, things weren’t ideal before, and we certainly aren’t marching in the right direction now.
How it ought to be:
Imagine that you were charged with setting the policies for social media sites from scratch. What would the ideal relationship be between humans and these apps that are presumably meant to connect humans? If social media didn’t exist before today and we were all deciding how and where it fits best in our lives, then paid verification would have a clearly beneficial role to serve two main purposes:
- Every account would have a verified identity by uploading identification proving they are who they say they are. This would effectively eliminate bots, trolls, spam, and imposters.
- The paid subscription model would negate the need to see advertisements in your feed, possibly with tiered levels such as Hulu. If you’re paying a subscription, you shouldn’t also be beaten over the head with ads.
Twitter and Meta have taken very different approaches to this dilemma at nearly the same timeframe. Neither one of them tackles the real values of verification from the user’s perspective. Effectively, both programs are nothing more than opportunistic money grabs. Meta’s paid checkmark does at least include verifying your identity, in addition to making you seem cool. The ads, though, never stop. For that, they accomplish one of the two benefits listed above.
Twitter’s current iteration provides neither benefit. While Musk deserves credit for spurring movement on these ideas, the way Twitter has incorporated paid checkmarks has been a never-ending comedy of errors, and it will likely change its policies another dozen times this year. The point, again, is that you just have to pay Twitter for the checkmark — you don’t have to upload a license or passport or anything, so the checkmark itself just means “I pay $8 a month,” and no real value is provided otherwise, except for them letting you turn back on your 2FA, run ads, and access other basic features.
One perspective would be that if social media were to truly operate at a level that benefited its users, then surely life would be a breeze. No trolls, no surprises. No fake reviews on restaurants, hotels, or movies. We would live in a digital, egalitarian utopia where, like in China (or an episode of Black Mirror), you would be monitored and given a social credit rating and every verifiable aspect of your life would be recorded on the blockchain. That’s one take, at least. Today we face a handful of looming contradictions: from our government’s inability to pass legislation regarding the internet at a pace that keeps up with innovation, to our general passivity regarding our privacy and data, to the age-old idea that if we just throw more money at something, it must get better.
The problem personified:
One could probably make some sort of devil’s advocate-type argument that anonymity is an inherent good that has always existed on the internet. In the same breath, such a debate could likely be framed that trolls, bots run by AI, spam accounts, catfish, and any other anonymous voices are valid in one form or another simply because that’s the way things have always been. The arguer could claim that it is really our regulation attempts that are reminiscent of imperialist tyranny, imposing our modern assumptions on wild and free, eternally evolving digital personas that may be real or fake. Social media ads, similarly, seem acceptable merely because that’s the business model that worked until now.
The fact is, the advertising model for social media is flawed. Social media sites should not be serving us ads if we are paying for their service. Some sites, like Amazon and Google, do make sense to serve hyper-targeted ads because they know what you’ve bought and that you want to buy something else. You’re on Amazon to buy something. You’re not scrolling Instagram or Twitter as a mere consumer, or are you? Maybe the idea of living 30 seconds without seeing an advertisement is unrealistic entitled silliness, and maybe the idea of knowing you are communicating online with a sentient being is just as outrageous.
It is not likely that social media sites will die off, but they will likely not be the juggernauts they are today if they’re restructured to benefit users. This all may sound like a pipe dream, but if you set up the internet today, knowing everything you know now, it is far from likely that you would choose to structure our largest social media sites and our relationships with them in any form currently in place. Right now they’re trying to get the best of both worlds: paid verification, ads, and at least in Twitter’s case, no thought given to actually verifying identities. Verification used to mean something, and it could be a valuable step forward if it was done with appropriate intention.
