Mark Zuckerberg confirms Facebook and Instagram are preparing to sell blue ticks

Meta CEO, billionaire Mark Zuckerberg, has just confirmed that Facebook and Instagram are preparing to launch a service to sell blue ticks to verify accounts for $12-15/month.

After Twitter failed to achieve much success in selling blue ticks, Instagram and Facebook are preparing to launch similar services. Photo:The Times.

According to Meta's leadership, the company will launch a blue tick sales service on Instagram this week. This service will provide users with a verified account tick and enjoy higher quality customer care.

"The new feature will increase the authenticity and security of our services," Mr. Zuckerberg affirmed.

According to Meta's CEO, the service will cost $11.99/month if paid via the web version and $14.99/month if paid on iOS. The service will be launched first in Australia and New Zealand before being rolled out to many other countries.

A few days earlier, programmer Alessandro Paluzzi shared withTechCrunch,He discovered code lines in the Instagram and Facebook apps that showed the two social networks were planning to sell blue checkmarks to verify accounts.

After that, many users also discovered a link to the introduction of the paid account verification service in Instagram's Support Center.

According to the introduction, Meta Verified (the name of the paid blue tick service of Meta - the parent company of Facebook and Instagram) is a service for personal and professional accounts that meet the requirements of the platform. Business accounts are not currently able to register to use this service.

The benefits of the service may change over time to improve the user experience. Once a user has completed verification on Instagram, the account will enjoy benefits including a blue tick, enhanced customer care, priority comment visibility, priority recommendations to other users, and many other features.

The introduction also states that blue ticks purchased on Instagram cannot be transferred to Facebook accounts. If users have multiple Instagram accounts, each account will have to pay a separate monthly fee to have blue ticks and accompanying utilities.

Instagram has not announced the monthly fee for the blue tick authentication service. The application's introduction to this service also clearly states that it is not yet available in the Vietnamese market.

Currently, registering to verify an account and receive a blue tick on Instagram is considered not easy. There have even appeared black markets selling Instagram blue ticks, where users have to pay up to tens of thousands of USD to buy the verification mark.

In the fourth quarter of 2022, Twitter launched a service to buy blue ticks to verify accounts for $8-11/month. This is one of the ambitious plans that billionaire Elon Musk implemented after acquiring this social network.

However, when deployed, Twitter's service was considered a "disaster" by both users and advertisers when it created a wave of fake accounts buying blue ticks to spread fake news and conspiracy theories.