Meta Following Elon Down The Road Of Making Verification An Upsell Is A Terrible Idea

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the c'mon-zuck dept

And here I was thinking that the last few months of Twitter shenanigans with Elon Musk at the helm had done something nearly impossible: made Mark Zuckerberg’s leadership of Meta (Facebook/Instagram) look thoughtful and balanced in comparison. But then, on Sunday, Zuckberg announced that Meta is following Musk down the dubious road of making “verification” an upsell product people can buy. This is a mistake for many reasons, just as it was a mistake when Musk did it.

To be clear, as with Twitter Blue, I have no issue with social media companies creating subscription services in which they provide users with more benefits / features etc. Indeed, I’ve been surprised at how little most social media companies have experimented with such subscription programs. Hell, even here at Techdirt, we’ve long had some cool perks and extra features for people willing to subscribe (if you don’t yet subscribe, check it out).

But, any such upsell / premium subscription offering has to be about actually providing real value to the end users. And, it should never involve undermining trust & safety for users. But, really, that’s what this is doing. As we wrote when Musk first floated the idea of charging for verification, it’s important to understand the history and the reasons social media companies embraced verification in the first place.

It wasn’t about providing value to that individual user, but rather about increasing the trust and safety of the entire platform, so that users wouldn’t be confused or fooled by impostors or inauthentic users. The goal, then, is to benefit everyone else using the platform to interact with the verified users, more than it is to benefit the verified users themselves.

But, in shifting it to a subscription service, as we’ve seen with Twitter, it seems to do plenty to undermine the trust and safety other users have regarding the platform, making it so they feel less comfortable recognizing verified users as legitimate.

Meta’s more detailed announcement, following Zuck’s posting it to an Instagram group, only serves to show how backwards this is, and how similar it is to Twitter Blue’s disastrous adaptations.

With Meta Verified, creators get:

A verified badge, confirming you’re the real you and that your account has been authenticated with a government ID.

More protection from impersonation with proactive account monitoring for impersonators who might target people with growing online audiences.

Help when you need it with access to a real person for common account issues.

Increased visibility and reach with prominence in some areas of the platform– like search, comments and recommendations.

Exclusive features to express yourself in unique ways.

We can walk through each one of these to show why it looks like Meta is just running out of ideas, and desperate to squeeze users.

Those first two items should never be paid premium services. As explained, verification is not so much for the user’s benefit but for the wider platform’s. Making it so only those with the means to do so get verified actually takes away much of the value of being verified. As for “more protection from impersonation,” it feels like… maybe that isn’t the kind of product you should be selling, but rather is kind of an indictment of a platform’s inability to protect its users.

“We failed to stop people from pretending to be you, so pay us to now protect you” is not exactly a strong sales pitch, Mark.

And, sure, there are services that let you pay for more urgent access to customer support, but again, this mostly just highlights just how terrible Meta customer support has been for years.

But, the last two points deserve special attention. Increased visibility in search, comments, and recommendations based on paying up is also something that Musk has done with Twitter Blue, but seems like a terrible idea that just encourages spammers and other bad actors to use this as a cheap way of being able to get more prominent attention for their spam and scams and the like. It also calls into serious question all the promises we’ve been hearing from Zuck for years now about the company’s increasing focus on relevance in its feeds. If they’re moving away from that to encourage paying up to reach people, it seems like we’re only moving further into the enshittification death spiral.

As for “exclusive features to express yourself in unique ways,” at first glance that sounds like maybe something that could be a useful thing as an upsell or premium offering, but the details (in a footnote) make it pretty clear this was a rushed afterthought.

We’ll offer exclusive stickers on Facebook and Instagram Stories and Facebook Reels, and 100 free stars a month on Facebook so you can show your support for other creators.

How… utterly unexciting.

Anyway, this definitely fits back in with the nature of Cory Doctorow’s enshittification death cycle. Remember how it works:

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

Nothing in this announcement really benefits users. It just squeezes more money out of them. Yes, Meta is presenting it as if there are real benefits for users, but users aren’t that dumb.

I’m sure that a decent number of people will sign up for this. And it’s certainly likely that the rollout won’t be as chaotic and embarrassing as Twitter’s paid verification program. But it seems quite likely to me that Meta is going to find the end result of this underwhelming, just as Twitter did.

Filed Under: mark zuckerberg, premium, security, subscriptions, trust, upsell, verification
Companies: facebook, instagram, meta