People on my Facebook friend’s list may have been secretly calling me a fool.
“Look at this guy. He paid Facebook for a verification badge.”
I did pay for “Meta Verified,” which adds the so-called blue tick to your Facebook name. But it wasn’t the verification badge I paid for. I couldn’t care less about the tick.
It’s the promise of getting real ‘customer support’ that got me interested.
You may be unaware if you don’t live in Bangladesh, but over on that piece of land, Facebook has become an essential part of daily life. It’s not just a social network anymore. It’s where you go for work, to be in the know, and to stay up to date with the daily events and affairs that affect everyone living in Bangladesh.
I wrote a lengthy post the other day to demonstrate how Facebook has become an integral part of life in Bangladesh. If you read that, you’ll understand why losing access to your Facebook account, and being left out without any support from a real human being, can be a daunting experience.
Facebook’s promise of customer support from real human agents is the only reason I subscribed to Meta Verified.
In fact, I’m not even that active on Facebook. I mostly re-share memes and occasional news stories. But I get all my news and updates from the people I follow in my industry — which is predominantly tech.
If something happened that would affect any aspect of my life, I would get the update from the groups and people I follow on Facebook, not from traditional news media.
A recent example is when Wise stopped offering Wise balance in Bangladesh. It had a considerable effect on remote workers in Bangladesh, and they were vocal about it in all the relevant groups. But no traditional media covered it.
It goes beyond just the industry news.
Living in Dhaka, I never plan to go out without checking Traffic Alert, a Facebook group where people share almost by-the-minute traffic updates. It’s not the kind of update you see on Google Maps, no. It’s what only someone on the ground can tell you about.
If you’re interested in discovering how Facebook has penetrated Bangladeshi lives, I encourage you to read the post about Facebook in Bangladesh.
Having been a victim of losing access to the Facebook account and being left without any support, I find Meta Verified worth the customer support. Though I hope I won’t have to contact support for anything.
There was a saying about social networking sites that if you weren’t paying for a product, you were the product. It’s funny that we can now pay for it, but we still remain the product.
Would you subscribe to Meta Verified (or Twitter Blue)? Why not?