There are spam accounts generated that appear to be the real person you already know.

Often actual people either lose their FB accounts because they forgot their password, lost the email associated or the 2FA etc... or they closed the account down.

Then real people open another account and re-connect to their old friend groups.

Spammers mimic this behaviour by replicating peoples accounts and then sending out new friends requests that appear to be from someone you know.

Once you accept the spammers friend request they begin to send you malware phishing links and so on.

I'm sure there are other scams around this I havent heard of! :-)

You don't.

This is for the Lady Gaga's and Elon Musks of facebook. Followers want to be able to know if they are following the real deal, and the real deal wants to be certain that they can be differentiated from the fakes.

I must not understand how Facebook works anymore. I didn't realize you can follow people, I thought you just sent mutual friend requests.

It used to be that you could search for "John" and it would show you a range of Johns that you might know. I just tried it and it recommended several "John Wick" pages. I found the button to set the search to only show "People", and it now shows me several Keanu Reeves accounts (probably all fake). I guess if you accept that this is what they want their search to look like, the "verified" angle does work.

It's also for Instagram.

the value generated by having them on the platform is probably thousands of times greater than that, so it's weird that they're charging a token fee for the privilege

Well, that’s why everyone thought Elon was stupid for introducing it.

But in line with facebooks strategy book, if a competitor is doing it, we better implement it too.

There would be 20,000 such Stars paying 10 dollars a month. Than what?

That covers the monthly cost of tyres for the Facebook private jets, one less thing to worry about /s

They should fleece the celebs better. Verified celeb (you are the real Tom Cruise not just share his name) pays $10k/m. That would still only be $200m though. Barely a seed round.

The real world system actually works in reverse to this ... the little people make large numbers of micropayments through pay / ads / donations / etc and the celebs get paid a big pile of cash after the platform takes its cut.

Musk and Meta are trying to reinvent this, but they have it backwards - if your platform depends on people to post "content" you should be rewarding the people that draw the masses to your platform not raising pointlessly small amounts directly from them.

There are celebrities you can follow on fb now. Or companies.