Social Media Impersonation and Verification Badge

Abstract

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 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 offering verification badges can lead to unintended consequences. For example, we find that 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 the genuine creator by enhancing impersonator credibility, making it harder for consumers to distinguish between real and fake profiles, ultimately benefiting impersonators more. Additionally, consumers may 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.