Getting Verified on Social Media
May
16
After Elon Musk bought out Twitter for roughly $44 billion in October of last year, the verification process changed the following month. Now, $8/month is all you need to get verified on Twitter, ultimately meaning anyone who can afford to spend $8 a month can become a verified user. Regardless, other social platforms also have verification systems in place that aren’t solely based on financial means. But that may change once Meta rolls out their new verification service to Facebook and Instagram on a wider scale.
Meta’s New Verification Service
Meta first tested their new verification service in New Zealand and Australia in February, but they’ve since opened it up to the U.S. in March. However, we haven’t heard reports about it yet. All we really know about Meta’s verification service is that it takes a government ID to verify the account and getting verified on Facebook and getting verified on Instagram are two separate processes. And paid verification costs $11.99/month on the web or $14.99/month either on Apple’s iOS or Android.
Verification on Other Social Platforms
So far, Meta isn’t the only platform that’s followed Twitter’s example by charging for verification status. After Twitter’s new verification system went live, Tumblr took advantage of the public ridicule that came with it by advertising its own $7.99 verification status. But unlike Twitter, it was a one-time fee (Twitter’s is monthly) and you get two checkmarks. From the description, it’s very clear that it’s a joke. But despite that it’s a parody of Twitter’s checkmarks and holds no real value on the platform, it still earned a 125% boost in in-app purchase revenue by February after releasing it in November, according to TechCrunch.
But YouTube and TikTok don’t currently charge for verification. Instead, YouTube has a whole process where users can request verification, which requires user accounts to be public and active, have at least 100,000 subscribers, a profile photo, a banner image, a description, great content, and represent a real person, brand, or identity. On TikTok, verification exists, but it’s unclear how it’s done.
Regardless, verification used to authenticate users, especially public figures, on social media. But now, it just means that the user paid for that checkmark (or checkmarks, in Tumblr’s case). Even though Twitter and Meta claim this new process aims at bulking up protection against fraudulent users, it doesn’t seem to be helping as much as they said it would.
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