Social Media Impersonation and Verification Badge

Due to the increasing prevalence of impersonation on social media, the platforms have actively adopted verification badges to combat such an issue. To explore whether providing verification badges to validate creators’ identities is an appropriate approach, we build a game-theoretic model to examine the impact of providing such badges on key stakeholders’ payoffs. Our study reveals that although offering verification badges seems to be good, it can lead to unintended consequences. For example, we find that the platform may not be better off in profitability by providing badges. Specifically, the platform encourages both creators and impersonators to purchase badges when the verification cost is low while discouraging badge application when the preparation cost is high. Surprisingly, providing verification badges can disadvantage genuine creators by enhancing impersonator credibility, making it harder for consumers to distinguish between real and fake profiles, ultimately benefiting impersonators more. Additionally, consumer experiences may sometimes be worse off when the influencers purchase the badge, as verified yet fraudulent accounts can more effectively deceive users, reducing the overall utility of consuming content.