So apparently Meta took a look at the user response to Twitter‘s new buy-it-now blue check “verification” program and decided hey, it wants some of that too.
“This week we’re starting to roll out Meta Verified—a subscription service that lets you verify your account with a government ID, get a blue badge, get extra impersonation protection against accounts claiming to be you, and get direct access to customer support,” Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a Facebook post over the weekend.
OK, we’ll admit that Meta’s verification sounds better than Twitter’s in that it does actually verify who users are. Twitter Blue, meanwhile, does not require a government ID and does not provide any extra security (yet: Twitter did just decide it wants to limit text message-based two-factor authentication to Blue users only).
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Like Twitter’s program, though, Meta’s promises “increased visibility and reach with prominence in some areas of the platform—like search, comments and recommendations.”
Meta Verified will bundle together Facebook and Instagram, so people paying into it will be verified on both platforms.
The program launches this week for users 18 and older in Australia and New Zealand, and will cost $19.99 Australian on the web/$24.99 Australian on mobile and $23.99 New Zealand on the web/$29.99 New Zealand on mobile, per month. When it comes to the U.S., it’ll be $11.99/$14.99 per month, according to Zuck’s update.
In a blog post, Meta said the new verification won’t affect accounts that are already verified. It’s not clear if it plans to take another page out of Twitter’s book and distinguish previously verified accounts—mostly belonging to public figures and celebrities—from pay-to-play verified accounts.
“Long term, we want to build a subscription offering that’s valuable to everyone, including creators, businesses and our community at large,” Meta said. It added that this new program is an effort to “expand access to verification [so] more people can trust the accounts they interact with are authentic.”
Meta says Verified will roll out to more countries “soon.”
