Facebook-owned Instagram may soon take a leaf out of Twitter’s book by allowing users to buy a blue verification badge, according to a line of code that references a “paid blue badge” and a new subscription product.
Last year, as part of Twitter CEO Elon Musk’s rampant efforts to monetise the platform following his turbulent $44 billion buyout, Twitter allowed any user to purchase the once-sought after blue verification badge as part of the service’s pay-monthly Twitter Blue subscription, leading to a spate of significant impersonations and confusion on the platform as any user could purchase the once-meaningful blue badge and claim their account represented whoever they wished, with no clear way to differentiate genuine accounts from impersonators.
Despite the flaws with Twitter’s new pay-to-play verification system, Facebook-owned Instagram appears to be developing a similar feature that would allow users to add a blue verification badge to their profile by subscribing to a new pay-monthly subscription service.
As reported by TechCrunch, developer and reverse engineer Alessandro Paluzzi, who has previously spotted a number of new Instagram features before they launched, has found a new reference to paid verification badges in the official Instagram code, noting that there’s nothing yet visible in the app itself beyond small code references, so we can only speculate on the findings for the time being.
As it stands, like Twitter did prior to Musk’s takeover, Instagram only awards blue badge verification to high-profile accounts that provide the platform with ways to verify that the account genuinely belongs to the company or individual it claims to represent.