Blue Check Confusion and Why Americans Are Sick of Social Media

It's hard for me to imagine a story topic more useless than one obsessing over celebrity fashion choices. Yet silencing my inner skeptic did lead me to discover this ironic story about how the most frequently shared image from the Met Gala was an AI-generated image of a celebrity who wasn't even there. It's like the coverage of the event was a parody of itself.

Still the example does offer the perfect lead in to a YouGov survey suggesting that Americans may be sick of social media primarily because it is so hard to know what is true and what isn't. Older and younger people alike seem to agree that social media is making this modern believability crisis worse. Twitter's "blue check confusion" is adding to the problem as anyone willing to pay $8 can now enjoy the aura of credibility even if they are not who they claim to be. Meta is likely to face a similar problem given they also offer paid validation. Both are effectively cheapening the value of that validation by making a willingness to pay for it the only criteria for approval.

Google and LinkedIn are taking a different approach. Google announced they will introduce blue checks to verify Gmail accounts. LinkedIn has partnered with Clear to offer true validation and has already indicated that it believes validating accounts without a price tag is the only way to build trust in their platform.

In the long term, it's easy to determine who the winners will be. After all, the people most willing to pay for our attention are usually the ones that deserve it the least.