The social media site X is getting ready to handle payments, like sending money to friends or buying things through the app. But their current way of checking who people are—those blue checkmarks—isn’t good enough for handling money. So, they’re teaming up with a company called Persona to make sure people are who they say they are.
Think of Persona as a digital ID checker. They help websites and apps make sure you’re really you. X will use Persona to check your government ID and scan your face to confirm your identity before you can use the new payment features. This makes sense, right? You want to be sure the person you’re sending money to is actually that person.
It’s interesting that X isn’t making everyone go through this tough ID check for the regular blue checkmark you pay for. Right now, that blue check just means you’re paying a monthly fee. But for payments, they need to be extra sure.
For a long time, people have argued about whether social media sites should make everyone prove who they are. Some say it would help get rid of fake accounts and meaner people online. Elon Musk, the owner of X, even thought about charging everyone for a blue checkmark so that only real people would pay, and fake accounts would be easy to spot.
But that didn’t really work out. Not many people pay for the blue check, and it doesn’t really prove who anyone is. So, X’s current blue check is more about who’s paying than who’s real.
But for payments, they need real proof. That’s why they’re using Persona. It seems like they found a way to check lots of people’s IDs without needing a huge number of workers. LinkedIn, another website, has already checked the IDs of millions of its users this way. This shows that it’s possible to have a more trustworthy way to deal with people online.
If X really wanted to fight fake accounts, they could make everyone prove their ID through Persona, not just the people who want to use payments. Other big sites like Facebook (Meta) could probably do this too. There might be some limits, and it might not work the same way in every country, but it looks like checking IDs online for everyone is becoming possible.
Of course, some people will disagree with this. They say people should be able to use different names and stay anonymous online. They have good points. But when you think about all the problems caused by fake accounts and people hiding who they are, having a way to know who’s real could make things a lot safer and more honest online.
So, X is taking a big step towards making payments secure by checking real IDs. This might just be the start of a bigger change in how social media sites think about who we really are online.
