Over the last few weeks my Instagram feed has become a fruit salad of blue checkmarks. And the same thing is happening on Twitter and Facebook.
Everyone I know and their dog is now verified. Bob the Builder is verified. John Doe is verified. As is Jane Doe, John Smith, Joe Public and a dear friend of mine.
I love her, man, but she’s an university teacher and got like 1,000 followers. Da Fuq do you need a blue checkmark for?
Elon “Occupy Mars” Musk kick-started the whole thing with Twitter Blue. Put simply, you don’t gotta be famous anymore to get verified on Twitter, you can just buy your blue tick.
Mr Zuckerberg took a leaf out of Musk’s book, even though I’m sure he’d never admit it, and came up with the same scheme for FB and, more importantly, Instagram.
That way, Jane Doe can keep posting pictures of her a*s in Dubai and justify her 500,000 followers, most of which are probably fake, with a blue checkmark.
Obviously, John “Buy-My-Course-To-Get-Rich” Smith did that, too. Crypto and financial scamm… pardon me, I mean influencers on Instagram were finally given the chance to maximise the impact of their FOLLOW-LINK, BUY-MY-COURSE lifestyle with a blue tick.
People want to get, be, look, feel famous. We’re not sure why. But it’s clearly part of human nature.
The thing is, with exceptions, there’s a rule of thumb when it comes to being verified on social media.
If you’ve got a Wikipedia page, then yes maybe you need – or at the very least you’re ‘allowed to want’ a blue tick.
And no, you canNOT write your own Wikipedia page. This is a common misconception. Wikipedia is a lot more accurate than people think (and are willing to accept), and it is monitored and edited constantly.
You can try writing your own Wikipedia page. I can pretty much guarantee it’ll be gone by the time you hit ‘save’.
I know because I tried that s**t (sorry, I know) when I was like 19. And when I was 19 Wikipedia was a lot smaller than it is today.
There are exceptions of course.
For example, I play football with a guy who works as a country marketing manager (something like that) for one of the world’s largest crypto exchanges. He constantly needs to report impersonators on Instagram. He’s not particularly famous, but he holds an important role in an environment where scammers thrive. Hence why he needs a blue tick.
But that’s the exception. The thing is, there’s a difference between being famous or recognisable, and between having a lot of social media following.
That’s not even close to being the same thing.
Think of this scenario.
Imagine having an ultra-popular American social media personality that’s only famous for being on social media on one hand, and a well-known, say, Slovakian musician on the other.
The Slovakian musician needs a blue checkmark. Why? Because even though it is very unlikely anybody will know him outside of his own country, people will absolutely recognise him in Slovakia. There’ll be fans, there’ll be impersonators. There’ll be people that saw the musician play live. They watched his/her music videos. They stood outside the concert waiting for an autograph or a photo.
The social media personality, meanwhile, only really exists on your screen. And it’s almost always static.
I apologise about this non-crypto rant but it really is getting my goat.
People who aren’t famous shouldn’t buy a blue checkmark, chiefly because it makes them look like fools.
bitcoinea 
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