The blue ticks for verified accounts they could become for payment also on Instagram, following the recent – and confusing – example of Twitter. The expert code analysis engineer Alexander Paluzzi in fact, it found lines of text suggesting that soon it will be possible to pay for verification on Meta’s social networks.
Instagram: will the blue ticks be paid (like on Twitter)?
Alessandro Paluzzi analyze the Instagram code for possible novelties through reverse engineering. In the recent past he found references to the Candid Stories feature, similar to BeReal – a function that actually arrived on the social network.
Now, the engineering seems to have come up with another major news: Instagram appears to be a paid account verification. A system similar to the one that arrived on Twitter under Elon Musk. The code snippets explicitly reference a “paid blue badge“, a real paid service. And it’s not just Instagram: the same reference also appears in the latest build of the Facebook app.
Paluzzi posted his discovery on Twitter and reached out to TechCrunch to post the scoop. But no denials or confirmations of any kind have arrived from Instagram. Typically, Instagram confirms tests when they’re discovered, but in the case of paid blue ticks, the company chose not to comment.
How the system might work
Without a confirmation from the company we are only on speculative ground: Mark Zuckerberg’s company could have only decided to evaluate the technical feasibility of the system, without intending (for now) to implement anything. But given that in the past the analyzes of Paluzzi’s code have led to concrete results, it is worth asking how the two largest social networks in the world would change.
Paluzzi found two lines of code that report “IG_NME_PAID_BLUE_BADGE_IDV” e “FB_NME_PAID_BLUE_BADGE_IDV”. According to Paluzzi, in this case IDV stands for “Identity Verification”. Added to this is the fact that in the code there are references to a new type of subscription for services previously not provided by Meta. By adding these two pieces of information, it seems that the “paid blu badgemay come as a monthly subscription service.
Screenshots on Alexander Paluzzivia TechCrunch
However, Paluzzi himself cautioned that there’s nothing visible in the app yet beyond these small code references. Better then Don’t jump to conclusions right away: this possible novelty still appears to be in the very early stages of its genesis and may never make it to the public.
Pay for the blue checks
Instagram’s account verification process has caused a lot of headaches over the years, mostly because of the complaints related to fully automated verification. Since 2018, users can request the blue check. But the process remains complex, although for a couple of years Adam Mosseri has promised that the company aims to improve it.
Currently, Instagram only dispenses the blue badge to celebrities and global brands or entities. But ordinary users and smaller creators have long sought similar recognition. So much so that there is a “black market” of blue checks, which ProPublica unveiled last year. Forcing Meta to remove illegally obtained badges from hundreds of accounts.
This means that behind the blue ticks there is a potential market, something Elon Musk had sensed from day one in Twitter. Too bad the implementation was poorly thought out and terribly executed, with users as they could change your name and profile picture to pretend to be corporations, brands and celebrities. Enough to have to withdraw and relaunch a complex system, with golden ticks for companies and new rules to limit abuse.
The bungled way Twitter implemented the idea doesn’t mean that has no commercial potential. And since Meta is struggling to invoice, with the large investment in the metaverse which – at least for now – is not bearing fruit, perhaps this novelty piques the curiosity of the company’s executives. In other words, paid blue ticks on Instagram are little more than speculation for now. But it wouldn’t be so surprising if they come true.