Last year following Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, the platform introduced a new Paid Subscription for its Blue tick verification system, now Instagram is rumoured to be introducing a similar subscription model.
Following a tweet by Reverse engineer and mobile developer Alessandro Paluzzi, who goes by the Twitter handle @alex193a, who claims that “Instagram is working on a subscription plan which includes the blue badge” and has seen hints at this subscription plan in the app’s source code. Though don’t get too excited as Alessandro states “…there are only a few small references in the code about this” so at the moment this new subscription is only a rumour with little evidence other than a couple of lines of code.
Source Code Leak
#Instagram is working on a subscription plan which includes the blue badge 👀
— Alessandro Paluzzi (@alex193a) February 2, 2023
Instagram is quite infamous for “Copying” features from other social media, most notably Instagram stories from Snapchat, Reels from Tiktok and at a big stretch the dual camera format of the relatively new social media, BeReal. With a history of borrowing ideas from other social media platforms, I personally wouldn’t be surprised if these rumours turned out to be true, especially one that could turn them a nice profit. I would also hazard a guess that with Instagram being owned by Meta, Facebook could also possibly get a similar subscription.
When Twitter released its verification subscription it was met with very serious problems concerning anyone being able to impersonate celebrities and companies by simply paying the fee for a blue tick, which led to plenty of funny and inappropriate tweets as well as chaos in the stock markets. If these rumours are true Instagram hopefully won’t repeat the same mistake, despite how genuinely funny the situation was.
What do you think of this rumour? Should Instagram introduce this subscription? Let us know in the comments.
