Meta Paid Verification will allow anyone to get a Blue Check

KEY POINTS—

• For $11.99 a month on the web and $14.99 a month on iOS, users on Instagram and Facebook will be able to submit their government ID and get a blue verification badge.

• "This new feature is about increasing authenticity and security across our services," Zuckerberg wrote in the post.

• The move comes after Twitter started selling verification as part of its Blue subscription service last year.

• Meta announced a new paid verification subscription service called Meta Verified, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Sunday.

Facebook and Instagram users will soon need to pay to be verified on the social media platforms, as Meta follows in the footsteps of rival platform Twitter.

The company currently provides free two-factor authentication through third-party apps and a security key, which is considered more secure than SMS-based systems.

If non-subscriber accounts that use SMS authentication do not switch before the deadline, Twitter said it would disable two-factor authentication for that account.

Twitter restricts SMS two-factor authentication to paid accounts.

Separately, Twitter announced on Friday it would provide SMS-based two-factor authentication only to users who are subscribed to the US$8-a-month ($11.65) Twitter Blue service from 20 March.

Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, announced in a Facebook post on Sunday that the service would first roll out in Australia and New Zealand later this week.

For $11.99 a month on the web and $14.99 a month on iOS, users on Meta's Instagram and Facebook platforms will be able to submit their government ID and get a blue verification badge.

The service will be introduced in Australia and New Zealand this week, and more countries will follow, Zuckerberg said.

Twitter launched its updated Twitter Blue subscription service in December after the company's new owner Elon Musk pulled and delayed the initial launch.

The Tesla and SpaceX CEO, who acquired Twitter for $44 billion in October, has said the new verification system will be "the great leveler" and give "power to the people."

A Meta spokesperson said Sunday that there are impersonation protections in place with Meta Verified subscriptions.

In order to qualify, users must be at least 18 years old, meet minimum account activity requirements and submit a government ID that matches their profile name and photo. Subscriptions will also include "proactive monitoring" for account impersonation, according to the spokesperson.

Musk has been open about his intent to eventually remove badges from Twitter accounts that were verified prior to the Twitter Blue launch, but Meta will not make changes to accounts that are already verified as the company tests its service, a spokesperson said.

Twitter’s last transparency report prior to Musk’s takeover shows that as of December 2021, although just 2.6% of active Twitter accounts use two-factor authentication, 74.4% of those use SMS as their method of authentication.

Musk has claimed Twitter was being “scammed” US$60m a year from fake two-factor authentication messages.

He separately supported a tweet claiming the scams were being run by telecommunications companies that had set up bot accounts to run the two-factor authentication process to get revenue from the text messages from Twitter.