Meta announced this week that it’s overhauling its system for giving out verification badges — those blue check marks that are pinned to the Instagram and Facebook profiles of public figures such as politicians, celebrities and journalists. In the past they were distributed to people and organizations based on their status as influential figures who are particularly vulnerable to impersonation; their officially confirmed identity made their statements reliable for reporting. Now those badges can be bought by anyone for the price of $11.99 per month for web, or $14.99 for mobile.
It’s likely that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg was inspired to unveil this plan after seeing Twitter CEO Elon Musk make a similar move a few months ago when he rolled out Twitter Blue subscriptions. The criteria for a blue verification badge on Twitter used to be tied to qualifying as a public figure — now it’s anybody willing to pay 8 bucks a month, and their identity does not need to be authenticated.
Making verification badges available to anyone for a monthly rate transforms their entire meaning.
This is not just a minor tweak of the system: Making verification badges available to anyone for a monthly rate transforms their entire meaning. Twitter and Meta appear to be banking on it as a way to monetize users seeking clout and influence. But the public is losing one of the most useful ways to mitigate the spread of misinformation and disinformation.
My general perspective on the issue of regulating misinformation is that we mostly can’t trust corporations to do it. On a philosophical level, I reject the claim that there is such a thing as objectivity when it comes to assessing complex truths. On a political level, I have little trust in unregulated, profit-seeking, engagement-maximizing entities to serve the public interest in their evaluations of what’s true or not. And on an empirical level, social media companies, with their wayward algorithms and opaque decision-making…
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