Earlier this year, Meta announced ‘Meta Verified’. This allows common users to have a blue check mark on their profiles in Instagram (including Threads for free) and Facebook in exchange for a monthly subscription. This was even before Elon Musk took over Twitter and changed the way verification was done on the blue bird app (before it became X).
Now, it seems this new feature from Meta finally made its way into the Philippines with users flaunting the blue checks in their IG profiles. The price? PHP 499 per month. That’s almost the cost of the top-tier Netflix subscription and all you’re getting for the money is a blue check in your profile. Or is it? In the IG interface, they said the check mark will come with the following benefits – increased account protection, direct support, and unique stickers.
Meta is positioning the service as a way that your followers and other users in the platform know that your profile is the real you. This will avoid impersonators mimicking your account, something our own Editor-in-Chief experienced a few weeks ago. To be fair, scam accounts and impersonators have been prevalent lately on all platforms. What’s astounding is that instead of beefing up their security and having better support, Meta just shrugged and said ‘eh, let’s make them pay for it.’
All of us have probably seen it at one point. One of our friends posts in Facebook, or Twitter, that there’s an account in a major platform impersonating them and asking for help in reporting said account. If the OP’s friends are kind, a lot of them will report the said account and the platform will remove it indeed. This could be easily averted with the blue check mark. But is it worth PHP 499?
There are also instances where accounts in Instagram are suspended or even disappeared. You can’t get a hold of support since you can’t use the platform for technically not having an account. There’s also revenge reporting where if I’m mad at someone, I will convince some people to report their account for whatever reason so that it gets suspended – all because I don’t like them anymore. How sure are they that situations like these would decrease with my 499 a month payment?
Another thing that it did is remove the prestige of the verification. Meta won’t remove the blue check marks of existing verified users unlike what Musk did in Twitter. Still, there’s a certain decrease in prestige with the icon beside your name now that you can pay for it. I’ve talked to a few with verified accounts in IG and majority of them don’t care about the new scheme. However, there are those who said that there’s now no point in having that if you can pay for it. The blue check mark used to represent that you’re an online personality, your posts have weight to them, there are a lot of interactions and engagements in your profile, thereby making you more sellable to potential advertisers and partners. Now, that blue check is nothing more but a paid feature.
From a wider point of view though, the sellability of profiles is just surface level concern compared to security. Meta should have been more responsible. They should’ve been more proactive in cyber attacks given that they’re one of the first to spearhead this movement. Regressing to a paid feature to give ‘better security’ and support is nothing but lazy work from Mark Zuckerberg and Adam Mosseri. We’re already tolerating their data farming for their advertisers, the least they can do is improve their security without asking us to pay for it.
