Meta – the parent company of Facebook and Instagram – wants power users to start paying for some of their site’s features, taking a page out of Twitter’s playbook to charge for the blue checkmarks that have been Verification.
Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, said Sunday in Facebook and Instagram posts a new subscription service called Meta Verified will be available this week in Australia and New Zealand and will open soon. extended to other countries. For $11.99 a month (or $14.99 if purchased on Apple’s operating system, iOS), users get a blue badge and direct access to customer support . The company describes the effort as a “gradual test”.
“This new feature is intended to increase authenticity and security across our services,” Zuckerberg wrote. The company says to be eligible for Meta Verified, users will have to submit a government ID to prove their identity, and registrants will only be allowed to use their legal name on their profile page. Mr. Zuckerberg said subscribers will get “additional protection against accounts posing as friends”.
A spokesperson for Meta said the service will be expanded to the US in the coming weeks. She declined to name other countries where Meta Verified will be available. She says that Facebook and Instagram accounts must be registered separately in Meta Verified—meaning those who want a blue badge on both sites must pay at least $24 a month—but Meta has a plan will eventually offer bundled subscriptions, she said.
For now, those who have verified their accounts on Instagram and Facebook will be able to keep them for free, Meta said in a blog post. The company described the new paid service as a way to “help potential creators grow their presence and build community faster”.
Meta’s sign-up move follows a push by Twitter under its new owner, Elon Musk, to charge users $8 a month for blue ticks through its Twitter Blue service. Twitter said last week that it would soon disable two-factor authentication via text messages for users who are not paid Twitter Blue subscribers.
Meta, which relies heavily on advertising revenue, has recently cut costs and found new sources of income — even as it continues to invest billions of dollars in moving into the so-called metaverse. When Facebook reported its latest quarterly earnings this month, Mr. Zuckerberg declared his 2023 management theme a “‘Effective Year'” and said his company was “focused on becoming a into a stronger and more resilient organization”.
