February 19th, 2023. The Little Blue Check.

Meta Verified.

For years there have been fake posts floating around that Facebook would switch to a paid subscription service. Often accompanied by a click-bait link or a call to action like “cut and paste this to your profile so they won’t change YOUR account!” or some such bullshit.

So, when I saw my friend Gina posting a complaint that Facebook subscriptions were finally on their way I was all too ready to cry foul and paste a factcheck.org link…

Except this time, it’s real. Not in the same sense that people are probably going to immediately think from the headlines. The harvest of people’s information and the sale of ads would probably be far-too-deeply curtailed if Facebook were to ACTUALLY switch to a paid-subscription model, though I DO wonder that there isn’t an ad-free “private” version of Facebook subscription that would be available at some cost…

This paid verification model, however, is interesting. It’s not SIMPLY “give us a monthly tithe and we’ll give you the Blue Checkmark of Veracity” as the Reformed Twitter Church of Musk hath laid out. A government-issued ID requirement means that it’ll actually be more onerous to get Facebook verification than it is to get a gun in 1/5 of the United States.

An interesting comparison when one gets to thinking about the weaponization of information.

In any case, as far as I can tell the only ACTUAL information about this so far is the following post from Mark Zuckerberg (complete with Blue Check) on Facebook and Instagram (which is a crap way to do press releases)

“Good morning and new product announcement: 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. This new feature is about increasing authenticity and security across our services. Meta Verified starts at $11.99 / month on web or $14.99 / month on iOS. We’ll be rolling out in Australia and New Zealand this week and more countries soon.”

… so nothing like Twitter (yet) where you get other perks including longer post-length, but I imagine at the very least, once this is rolled out, there will probably be Timeline tweaks that involve giving priority to Meta Verified accounts.

Long ago I’d thought that if Facebook offered a legitimate SUBSCRIPTION service – e.g. I pay $x / month and they DON’T serve me ads and they DON’T gather all my private information, that there might be a dollar amount I’d actually be happy with.  Later I came to feel that giving them any money at all was simply being TOO complicit with an entity that I’ve come to feel has monetized and gamified hatred and tribalism across the world. I continue to feel that it’s social media is SO embedded in our Lives that as a small, independent artist, it seems to be a necessary evil.

So… what happens next? They aren’t rolling out Meta Verify to businesses – probably because the Blue Check appears to be the same one that businesses can already receive… I’m still not clear as to why ilyAIMY CAN’T get a blue check while most of my friends’ solo singer/songwriter self CAN,  – we have more followers, have existed longer, etc… I’m certainly not going to PAY for one. And honestly, it doesn’t seem to have that much effect on our visibility, but who REALLY knows… but scrolling through my Timeline I certainly see a whole lot of bands’ posts that are NOT accompanied by Blue Checks… hardly scientific, I know…

It might just be a cash grab, coupled with the hope to look as if they’re DOING something re: election fraud, disinformation, misinformation, and the above gamification of hatred and tribalism. If it’s genuinely an attempt at eliminating fake accounts and false information, much of which is disseminated via Facebook Groups, I’d actually expect there to be a follow up requirement that Facebook Groups (and possibly Pages) could only be administered by Meta Verified accounts. Though, again, I don’t want to give a CENT to Facebook because I think they’re the root of a LOT of evils in the world, I’m not entirely sure that would be a bad thing.

But I think they’re just trying to LOOK like they’re doing something, while making a buck at the same time. They’ll ENCOURAGE the Blue Check. They won’t force the issue. People with money will get it, people without it won’t. I’d say they will then slowly be silenced and turned invisible on the largest social media network on the planet – but then I come back to the idea that the problem is, is that I hate the social aspects of social media, I’m ONLY here for business… who am *I* to complain when the environment bows to … business?

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