Seems to be a lazy clone of Musk policy from Twitter... Isn't it crazy that now private companies (not even in conjunction with governments that issue IDs) are selling online legitimacy?
These moves are driven by ignorant (outright) class-ism, and social media is quickly becoming a system of fraud that supports the wealthy while disabling people who don't pay. It's going to corrupt every aspect of life from news to entertainment if it hasn't already.... Trending topics used to be somewhat accurate because they were based on everyone's posts rather than just the posts of people who could afford to pay for verification. Because platforms got greedy and couldn't make platforms work with corporate sponsoring advertiser funding alone, they turn on users, the very people already working for free... This is not sustainable business. These platforms create schemes like crypto and NFT scams, info harvesting, unfair moderation, user account lockout extortion schemes, fake followers, payola promotion, ban extortion, industry plants, and many other criminal things to extort their user base. It's the modern day large-scale criminal enterprise to run a social media site.... The reason it's not obvious is because no one sees the code at work, they just see the end result of content creators.
This is really short-sighted (stupid actually) tech leadership based on profit desperation. I hope people begin to defund these large social media entities, as they are no good for anyone's progress, except for the company CEOs and Investors perhaps... Ugh.