Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a new paid subscription service for Facebook and Instagram on Sunday, the19th of February, extensively granting users a hallowed blue check for a monthly fee. Meta Verified will cost $11.99 a month on web and $14.99 a month on iOS. It’s launching in Australia and New Zealand this week ahead of a wider rollout.
The subscription “lets you verify your account with a government ID, get a blue badge, get extra impersonation protection against accounts claiming to be you, and get direct access to customer support,” Zuckerberg said. The Facebook founder noted that providing direct access to customer support will cost “a significant amount of money,” which will be made up for with subscription revenue. Now all those people wondering to have a verified tick to their name can thankfully go ahead and get it done without any problem whatsoever. This will inherently save a lot of crime and web scams, to say the least.
The new option comes after Twitter launched a revamped, more intense version of its own paid service, Twitter Blue, which allows users to get a verified profile and other benefits. Elon Musk rolled out Twitter Blue soon after closing his $44 billion deal to purchase the company last year, nonetheless. Trust Elon to make odd changes throughout.
He said at the time that Twitter was seeing a “massive drop in revenue” due to an exodus of advertisers from the platform. Meta has faced its own problems over the past year and a half, with shares of the company’s stock down about 54% since its September 2021 high. The social media giant has laid off about 11,000 workers in recent months, part of a wider downturn among big tech companies and is set to lay off some more, with workers claiming they have already started getting their low performance reviews in emails, wondering if at all its their time to be thrown out.
