Where Musk has gone, Zuckerberg has followed. Months after Twitter’s new owner had the idea of charging users for Twitter Blue, a service offering a blue identity verification badge plus some additional perks to paying subscribers, Meta’s chief executive has announced a broadly similar offering, Meta Verified, for Facebook and Instagram.
Details of the new programme remain as thin as Twitter’s profits, but are a reminder that even a company as mighty as Meta cannot sit back on its business model of (ostensibly) free usage.
As with so much of what passes for a “free” service online, users don’t pay in cash to use Facebook or Instagram. Instead, advertisers pay Meta for specific access to them. User data gleaned from every aspect of what users do on these social media sites – drawn from posts and images, likes, follows, friends, group memberships, purchases and comments – all construct a data profile for each user that can be marketed to advertisers. And the data hoovering isn’t restricted to what a user does on one of Meta’s sites. Tracking cookies follow users once they head off to other websites, too. This surreptitious user data monetising is known as surveillance capitalism.
It is a business model under threat. Meta’s profits were hit by several factors recently, but the company has said a single pro-privacy decision by Apple in 2021 to limit the ability of companies like Meta to track users wiped out $10 billion (¤9.2 billion) in expected revenue last year. So, like Twitter (hit more modestly by Apple’s tweaks), Meta is looking to diversify its revenue streams.
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But charging for verified accounts is a crass move. Selective verification used to be free, and offered all service users the assurance that some key accounts and sources of information were actually those organisations or individuals.
As social media sites struggle with a growing plague of misinformation, turning this modest but critical element of online trust, accountability and disinformation management into a revenue and marketing ploy does little to promote broader user confidence in social media services.