Social media becomes just another tick-boxing exercise

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The gloves are off, and the blue tick boxing match has begun between the major social networks. In an age where everything is monetized, the blue tick has joined the crowd and put a price on status… which might end up being worthless.

Getting verified with a blue tick on any social media site was always… validating. Your friends applauded, the gifs and the emoji flooded in, and you could celebrate because you were *important*, at least in the eyes of the social gods we all, to at least some extent, worship at the feet of.?

It’s a status symbol. It’s bragging rights. It’s a way for users to differentiate between an account of note and a regular account and to avoid any risks of impersonation. But what else? “Besides the digital street cred it provides, a blue tick has limited tangible benefits,” Shephali Bhatt of Mint said. But that digital street cred is something everyone wants.?

People I’ve spoken to working either as social consultants or at the social networks themselves talked of the dozens (and dozens and dozens and dozens) of emails/DMs they would receive each week asking about the “trick” to get verified. Status, particularly a verified one, matters. Now that’s all changing…??

Twitter introduced its Blue service in December 2022 for $8 a month (more if through app stores), and Facebook/Instagram parent company Meta has just followed suit, charging $12 for the privilege. For that, you get a blue tick; in Twitter’s case, you get access to some formerly core features; in Meta’s case, you’ll get "direct access to customer support,"? And you’ll also get… erm… bragging rights you can afford the monthly fee.??

“Inevitable,” was the one-word reply of Twitter CEO Elon Musk.??

How much is a blue tick really worth? Is it more valuable to the users or to the big tech businesses? Does putting a dollar value on verification mean losing all its value? And what’s the endgame of this box-ticking, tick-boxing exercise now everything is meant to be verifiable anyway???

It all comes down to whether social networks need creators more than creators need social networks. YouTube needs MrBeast more than Mr. Beast needs YouTube, for example, but does influencer X, with 6 or 7,000 followers, have any other choice than to join in, pay up and join the verified brigade? Elon Musk is betting that enough users are willing to pay for status without it devaluing the process to make it meaningless.?

“We are left with a harrowing vision of a fragile and flawed online public square: in a world where everyone is verified, no one is verified” - Professor Timothy Graham, the Queensland University of Technology

What’s different with Meta is it’s had the chance to learn from Twitter’s mistakes. Nobody currently verified on Facebook or Instagram will have to pay, they haven’t said anything about gold verification, and it’s still unclear if the “paid for” blue ticks will be differentiated on Meta’s platforms like Twitter’s is. A key thing is the necessity of a government-issued ID and a clear profile picture that matches it.?

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s “mission” has always been about the internet for all and, at least in the press releases, about a level playing field where everyone has the same access to the same information. Verification here tallies with that same “mission,” but that is not why this is happening.?

Meta’s net income fell 41% year-on-year in recently released reports, and it is having to come to terms with a change (and reduction) in advertising spend, up until now, pretty much its sole business model.?

The algorithms always were open to, and openly were, manipulated for business reasons. Meta’s Facebook liked news publishers, then didn’t, then liked video, then didn’t, then… (repeat for at least five more “permanent” initiatives that lasted months), regardless of what audiences wanted. Say the words ”pivot to video” to any social journalist, and they’ll shudder at the millions of dollars and hundreds, even thousands, of jobs lost following Meta’s change of direction. It’s clear now, with Musk tweaking the algorithm so his tweets were shown to more people, with TikTok’s “heating” button Infinite Scroll talked about recently, the idea of “reach” is now a business opportunity.?

Would you pay $10 (or more?) to have your social posts seen by ten times as many people?

Big tech is betting that creators who need audiences will pay to make sure it’s not taken away. There is more than a faint similarity between social’s targeting of influencers and creators and how it targeted major publishers a decade ago. This pivot to user verification could be another one in the long road of pivots from “fail fast” social networks.

Around 300,000 of ~260 million active Twitter users have signed up for its Blue service, according to researcher Travis Brown, meaning a $2.4 million monthly revenue. But that’s still only 0.12% of its users signed up.

Let’s assume that Meta’s initiative will have a similar pickup. The company’s most recent filings show 2.96 billion daily active users across its apps (this does include Whatsapp, so take it with a pinch of salt). This means that around 3.5 million people will sign up in the first couple of months, adding $41 million monthly —or half a billion dollars annually — to Meta’s bottom line, accounting for an increase of less than 0.5% total revenue. Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Mandeep Singh thinks it may add $2 to $3 billion to annual revenue, but that’s still a relatively minor income source. So why bother??

The loss of advertising revenue is being felt across all ad-supported industries. “We seem to have entered an economic downturn that will have a broad impact on the digital advertising business,” Zuckerberg said last year. It could be a blip, and revenues will bounce back when the economy recovers, but it could be more of a fundamental shift that social media needs to get ahead of.?

The rise of Web 3.0 —the idea of a decentralized web built from the bottom up rather than the top down — means that a site with 3 billion daily active users could vanish. Users will get more control of their data, will need big tech gatekeepers less and less for communication, and brands will be focusing on building their communities rather than piggybacking other people’s. This means relatively smaller social media sites that people pay to be part of rather than the “de facto public town square” model that Facebook and Twitter have used in the past.?

The risk here is that the verified tick loses all meaning. Reports coming out this morning seem to show Meta employees saying that the “integrity of the blue checks will decrease,” though we cannot independently verify these screenshots.?

“We are left with a harrowing vision of a fragile and flawed online public square: in a world where everyone is verified, no one is verified,” Professor Timothy Graham, of the Queensland University of Technology, wrote in The Conversation.?

It all adds to the idea of a public town square fading… at least one that doesn’t charge a hefty entrance fee for any of the rides.?

The questions we still don’t have answers to after researching this article: (all musings/questions/opinions welcome to [email protected] if you think you know the answers)?

1. How much is a tick really worth? Will influencer advertisers pay more for a verified user and increase that rate if they’re “organically” verified rather than “paid for” verified??
2. Did Meta really just copy Twitter? If the sum is 2+2, the answer is usually four, but nobody we spoke to would definitively say it was a direct “copy,” with some pointing to plans that were in the works well before Musk took over Twitter.
3. What about the TikTok in the room? TikTok has been quick to monetize, quick to amass audience numbers, and quick to move into new spaces alongside its competitors. Could it offer something similar?