Meta Launching New $12 Verified Badge For Facebook And Instagram To Combat Impersonators

A new announcement by CEO Mark Zuckerberg states that Meta intends to introduce a new badge blue for verified accounts on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter this week. The service, which sounds an awful lot like Twitter’s Blue service, will cost $11.99 per month for users who apply on the web or $14.99 per month on iOS—likely because Apple takes a $3 cut on subscriptions and Facebook is trying to price that in.

Meta, a government identification will be required to give users a blue checkmark. Zuckerberg stated that the goal of this project is to combat impersonation.

Users will also “get direct access to customer support,” though it’s not immediately clear what that will look like. Small businesses often complain about the difficulty of communicating with Facebook when there’s a problem with their accounts.

“Direct access to customer support is the real value, much more so than the blue check mark,” one user wrote in response to Zuckerberg’s announcement on Sunday morning.

“I agree that’s a big part of the value. Also, once you’ve verified your account with a government ID we can more effectively find and remove any imposter accounts since we know which account is the real you,” Zuckerberg responded.

Zuckerberg said that the service would begin to roll out next week but left some uncertainty as to when the service will become available in other countries.

“We’ll be rolling out in Australia and New Zealand this week and more countries soon,” Zuckerberg wrote.

Twitter already has a checkmark system, which cost $8 on web and $11 on iOS, but it’s adopted a confusing array of different colors since CEO Elon Musk took over in October. However, it seems like Zuckerberg is only planning for blue. The Meta CEO has previously said blue is his favorite color because he’s red-green color blind.

Meta didn’t immediately respond to Sunday morning’s email with any questions. I’ll update this post if I hear back.