Meta is testing a subscription service that will let Instagram, as well as Facebook users, pay for verification, Mark Zuckerberg announced on Instagram Sunday.
“Meta Verified” will start at $11.99 per month on the web or $14.99 per month on iOS and the company will start releasing the app to Australia as well as New Zealand this week and “more countries will be added to the near future.”
The service also includes additional benefits, including security against impersonation accounts, as well as the ability to directly contact customer support.
To prevent fake accounts, users who would like to receive the blue badge require a government ID that matches their profile’s name and photo. They must also be at least 18 years old to be qualified.
“This brand new function is all about improving security and authenticity across all our products,” Zuckerberg wrote in an article on the Instagram stream channel.
In an announcement, Meta clarified there will not be any changes made to accounts that have been verified. Verification used to be only available to users who were “authentic and noteworthy.”
“We are redefining the significance that the blue badge has to concentrate on authenticity to provide verification to many more individuals,” a Meta spokesperson explained. “We will be displaying follower count across more locations so that users can identify the notable public figures, and which accounts have similar names.”
Meta joins other platforms such as Discord, Reddit, and YouTube which offer subscription-based models of their own.
Twitter relaunched its verification program, Twitter Blue, in December after an increase in instances of fraudulent “verified” accounts caused it to halt the feature. The check mark options feature different colors that differentiate between accounts such as gold checks for corporations grey checks for government institutions as well as other organizations as well as blue checks for individual users, regardless of whether or not they’re famous.
Twitter Blue costs $11 a month for iOS and Android users, as one of the perks of the owner Elon Musk’s efforts to boost the subscription business of the company after purchasing the company for $44 billion.
