Radio Transcript: Meta’s roll out of a paid blue tick verification and Twitters change to two-factor authentication

20 February 2021
Speakers:
Scott Wales, ABC News
Prof Daniel Angus, ADM+S at QUT

Scott Wales:

Facebook and Instagram’s parent company Meta will roll out a paid subscription service in Australia and New Zealand this week that will let users verify their accounts and get a blue tick if they pay the money. The company says the service will increase the visibility of users’ posts and provide extra protection against impersonation. 

The move comes after Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter, implemented the premium Twitter Blue subscription back in November. Daniel Angus is a professor of digital Communication, leader of the Computational Communication and Culture programme at the Queensland University of Technology. He joins us now. 

Morning to you, Daniel. Thanks for your time. 

Daniel Angus:

No worries at all.

Scott Wales:

These sudden decisions, you know, to now have users pay to verify their identity of been causing serious upheavals in the industry. Just for people who don’t know, you never used to have to pay, but if you could verify that you were, I guess, the person of significance, you’ve got that blue tick. 

What’s driving these decisions to move very basic checks behind a paywall?

Daniel Angus:

Look, the platforms as they mature are kind of engaging more rent seeking behaviours. So absolutely in the case of Twitter it was about clawing back revenue and the idea that Musk’s completely misguided, thought that, every user on that platform was like himself and essentially wanted extremely high visibility and so would be able to extort this money out of them in order to try and verify their profile and perhaps boost their profile on the platform but actually found with Twitter all that happened was chaos, so users used the mechanism then to impersonate brands, some very high profile brands which led to eye-watering stock crashes and stock price doubts. 

So this is not a move that is supported by the research and the mis/disinformation community and its essentially rent seeking. 

Scott Wales:

Yeah it’s interesting that. One example that Eli Lilly pharmaceutical company claiming that insulin was free in the US and wiped off millions with it’s shares plummeting, as you say often disastrous consequences with brands and celebrities being impersonated.

Meta has billions of users on its platforms, how successful despite those risks do you think this paid subscription will be in verifying accounts.

Daniel Angus:

I don’t think it will make any difference whatsoever from trust on the platform to the spread of mis- and dis- information on the platform. We’ve been tracking the spread of this disinformation for many years now, we’ve been tracking hundreds of thousands of posts which contain some pretty disgusting mis and dis- information often of a very personal nature and this move will do nothing to actually curb the spread of that. 

It’s profitable for the platform to maintain pages and groups which spread disinformation. So unless they are getting serious about curbing that then verifying profiles and extracting more rent from users for doing so is not going to do anything to curb that spread. 

Scott Wales:

Do you think that other platforms will follow suit though, I’m thinking you know, Redditt and YouTube platforms like that. 

Daniel Angus:

So other platforms have toyed around with voluntary subscriptions. You mentioned Reddit there. They’ve had paid features on there platform for some time but they’re opt in , in a way that they kind of I guess try to build community in a much more organic way .

This kind of rent seeking, it’s more extractive and it’s almost extortion because, you know, when you package it with basic security features like two-factor authentication, what you’re saying is your security doesn’t matter unless you’re willing to pay and that’s a very dangerous precedent. 

Scott Wales:

You said, you sort of admitted though you didn’t think it was going to make a whole lot of a difference. Do you think it could drive users away from the platforms though?

Daniel Angus:

The platforms are already seeing users driven away. They’ve stopped kind of keeping up with trends, they haven’t managed their platforms well in that sense. So the new generations are already abandoning these platforms to other platforms like Tik Tok and others. So this is just I guess, you know, watching that kind of slow death in real time and so as I said this is kind of that late stage of the platforms where they’re now just trying to claw back any signs of revenue they can from their users.

Scott Wales:

Yeah well it’s an interesting development over the weekend involving Twitter, just while I’ve got you there Daniel.  But going over the weekend to remove this SMS two-factor authentication, that’s the most basic way to secure your account, but it moved it behind a paywall and many have criticized the decision saying Elon Musk claimed that Twitter’s being scammed by Bots, it shows he doesn’t really understand how this works.

What is the situation there to get my head around that? How does the SMS two-factor authentication work?

Daniel Angus:

So any kind of two-factor authentication, what it’s doing is it’s kind of protecting another line of defense. 

So you’re not just using a username and password, you’re instead using that. And then also some like an SMS or often an app on your phone that you have to physically then click on to say, “Yes” that’s me logging into this particular social media account or digital account, and the removal of that makes it just far easier for users to hack into account that passwords are weak and there are weak form of protection in some ways and basic kind of two FA means that users can have some assurance that unless someone steals their phone that they’re going to be the only person able to log in to that. And so by kind of pushing this behind a paywall or extorting users to pay for this basic level of security, it really is a slap in the face of those power users that rely on this to actually keep their accounts secure. 

Scott Wales:

If companies begin to make basic security functions like that, something users have to pay for. Are you concerned about that? I mean, what impact could that have on the security of these social media platforms and that of social media users? Not everyone’s going to take that up. 

Daniel Angus: 

No, And I think it does, it erodes the sense of security you have with the platform, the trust you have with the platform as well. From a lay user perspective, it also erodes like whether we know that what has been said on there is in fact, you know, from that person, you know, is this account being hacked. And there’s been numerous instances of this where big celebrities have said things on social media and later kind of backtracked on it saying, no, my account was hacked. Some perhaps true, some perhaps a bit of a furphy to backtrack, something that they otherwise would have regretted. But still, the fact remains that you can’t extort users around basic security features. These are something that’s part and parcel of running a successful social media operation is providing security to your users. And the fact that they’re asking for payment for those shows that they’re out of ideas. And we are very much in the late stage of these platforms losing their power. 

Scott Wales:

Yeah, it’s an extraordinary situation, isn’t it. Daniel, thank you for joining us. I appreciate your time. 

Daniel Angus:

No worries at all.