Social media is in its flop era now that buying blue checks is a verified ‘ick’

Formerly the hallmark symbol of notoriety, being verified online has become a shameful branding.

The coveted blue check — sought after by many but rarely granted — lost its shiny allure thanks to its monetization by both Twitter and Meta, the parent company to Instagram and Facebook.

The “internet’s Oscar,” as content creator Grace O’Malley calls it, “loses its credibility” when anyone can have it.

“For any Joe Schmo to be able to go grab it kind of stinks,” the “Plan Bri Uncut” co-host and “Niche” host, 24, told The Post.

Last month, Twitter’s newfound CEO Elon Musk yanked the hallowed symbols from a slew of celebrities, companies and figures alike, asking them to cough up a monthly fee of $8 to retrieve it. (Although Musk graciously returned the verification symbol to a select few A-listers.)

While Meta has not revoked the already-instated blue checks from its VIPs, the tech giant recently rolled out Meta Verified, where verification can be yours for just $14.99 a month.

O’Malley — who boasts nearly 500,000 followers across Instagram and TikTok yet is still unverified across platforms — compared the pay-to-play verification process to a Disneyland FastPass. Now, impatient users vying for internet fame can skip the line that others waited years in.

“I think the people who bought it are silly,” the Barstool hire said. “It’s a very silly concept because now you know that anyone could buy it.”

“And, if you got yours organically, I think it’s now time to make that a very big deal.”

In the golden heyday of social media, blue checks were reserved for the internet elite: celebrities, businesses, journalists and, more recently, influencers. Twitter was for 140-character word vomit. Instagram had yet to introduce Reels, Stories or its inundating suggested videos. The over-saturated “Nashville” filter reigned supreme. Life was simpler.

To get your mitts on the sovereign blue tick, there was an application process — proof that you were important — and a waiting period. Weeks would drudge by as applicants anxiously awaited the day the cerulean status symbol would grace their profile.

More often than not, requests were denied, and many users remained in their unverified, plebeian tier. On the miraculous occasion verification was granted, raucous celebration ensued in the form of online gloating.

Now, being verified is a bona-fide “ick,” or something disgustingly cringeworthy, and users are eager to ditch their blue checks out of embarrassment.

“The value, the meaning, the status symbol of the blue checkmark has almost evaporated overnight,” Dr. Sinan Aral, an information technology and marketing professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told The Post.

Aral has extensively studied the effects of social media on society, and some of his recent research, published in the journal Nature last year, investigated the effects of identity markers on social media interactions.

Using a social media model similar to Reddit, researchers analyzed how users interacted with and without identity markers. Those with identity cues garnered more engagement, suggesting that people’s reactions are not influenced by the content itself, but rather who is posting it.

“By analogy, somebody who’s verified — you’re going to form an opinion about the content that they’re producing based on that verification and you’re going to make a knee-jerk reaction about whether that content is reliable or not based on these cues,” said Aral, author of “The Hype Machine.”

Now, that model has been turned on its head.

Manhattan-based creator Davis Burleson argued that the ability to purchase a blue check mark — instead of earning it the old-fashioned way — is only exaggerating Gen Z’s obsession with being “better than the person next to them.

“I just don’t like how it’s feeding people’s egos,” the verified creator said in a TikTok shared last month with his 525,000 followers on the app, who agreed being verified is not as “exclusive” as it once was.

In fact, it’s “uncool,” Aral noted.

But the problem of the pay-to-play model isn’t only rooted in its newfound tackiness. The platforms are also offering increased visibility for subscribers online, raising concerns over who is being heard and who is not.

If social media is meant to be a digital “town square,” Aral said, it becomes “pay-for-speech,” which “inherently disadvantages those who have less means.”

The Post has reached out to Meta for comment. When contacted by The Post, Twitter’s press email address automatically responded with a poop emoji.

While dissatisfied Twitter users jump ship, Meta is laying off employees en masse. In 2022, the company’s profit and revenue plummeted and Facebook reported its first-ever decline in active users, despite company assurances that it is “thriving” with 2 billion daily users.

As those apps wane, the remaining options are desolate. Snapchat is a graveyard of expired streaks, BeReal’s hype was short-lived and TikTok might meet the same fate as Vine as a potential ban looms.

TikTok is the current fan favorite among American teens, while Instagram was reportedly nervous to lose its “pipeline” of young users. The platform adapted its interface to mimic features of other popular apps with the Stories and Reels features, eliciting cries to “make Instagram Instagram again.”

“Gen Z’s relationship with Instagram is much like millennials’ relationship with Facebook: Begrudgingly necessary,” Casey Lewis, a youth-culture consultant, told the Atlantic, which announced the app is “over.”

“They don’t want to be on it, but they feel it’s weird if they’re not.”

O’Malley, whose career is rooted online, pondered social media’s fate. Since “we don’t think what our parents do is cool,” what will future generations think of the internet?

“Somebody had this thought that, when we are adults, our kids are going to look at the internet and say, ‘That was so not cool, because like we’d rather live life than be attached to our phones all the time,’ ” O’Malley said, musing that perhaps the internet might “just go away over time.”

But without any viable networking alternatives, Aral countered, social networking will never be completely obsolete.

Twitter rival Mastodon “didn’t really go very far,” he explained, because “people want to be where the conversation is happening,” and don’t want to sacrifice their years’ worth of posts, following and digital networking.

In fact, people “have now realized how valuable a global platform for instantaneous, scalable communication is,” he said.

“I don’t think people are just going to give up that ability.”