Facebook Announces Pricey BlueTick ‘Verified’ Service

Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, announced on Sunday, February 19, that it is launching a new ‘subscription’ service experience based on payments by users.

The ‘MetaVerified’ service will be made available in Australia and New Zealand earlier this week, which will verify users’ identities and provide them with a blue badge to indicate their status.

The company’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, said the subscription will ensure additional security and priority customer support to prevent impersonation.

For this, users will have to pay a fee of about twelve US dollars per month for the website and about fifteen US dollars per month on Apple’s iOS or Android system.

Announcing this, Marc Zuckerberg said, “Starting this week, we’re launching a ‘MetaVerified’ subscription service, which will verify your account with an official ID, providing a blue badge. It will also provide you with protection from copycats and direct access to customer support.” He adds, “All these new features will ensure authenticity and security across all our services. are related to enhancement.”

The service Meta has announced is almost identical to Elon Musk’s scheme that he talked about on Twitter for an eight-dollar-a-month fee.

Twitter’s announcement last year began with embarrassing news about fake accounts on the platform, not only scaring advertisers but also raising doubts about the site’s future.

For these reasons, Elon Musk was forced to briefly suspend the service before relaunching it in December. Zuckerberg, however, emphasized that there will be no changes to pre-verified accounts on Facebook and Instagram.

Social media apps like Snapchat, Snap Ink and Telegram also launched similar subscription services last year on a payment basis, a new source of revenue.

Meta is under a lot of pressure after taking a big gamble on the virtual reality world, Metaverse. Earlier this month, Meta acknowledged a decline in revenue for the first time since going public in 2012. Its sales fell 1 percent last year to $116.6 billion.

Facebook’s user growth has also slowed, but the company recently announced that it has reached two billion daily users on Facebook for the first time.