Proving something is real now costs money. You want people to believe you’re actually you? Eight dollars a month.
Twitter killed verification in April 2023. The blue checkmark used to mean “we confirmed this person.” Now it means “this person paid us.” Meta followed at fifteen monthly, tiers up to three fifty. Nobody trusts these badges anymore.
Meanwhile, we’re drowning in fakes. Deepfakes hit eight million files in 2025, up from half a million in 2023. A finance worker in Hong Kong authorized a twenty five million dollar wire transfer on a Zoom call. Every person was AI generated. The CFO, the colleagues, all of it.
Voice cloning scams spiked four hundred forty two percent in late 2024. Fifteen seconds of audio is all you need. One woman lost sixty thousand dollars talking to fake Elon Musk on video.
Humans are at seventy three percent accuracy identifying fake audio. For clips under twenty seconds, sixty percent. Coin flip territory. In mixed tests, only point one percent caught all the fakes.
Tech companies say “we’ve got watermarking.” Google’s SynthID, OpenAI’s tools. Ten billion pieces watermarked already.
Except researchers built UnMarker. Strips watermarks by messing with spectral frequencies. Compress an image, watermark’s gone. Crop it, toast. Screenshot it, clear.
For text it’s easier. Paraphrase and the watermark disappears. Websites now let you bypass detection tools with one click. OpenAI claims ninety nine point nine percent accuracy, but Stanford showed basic modifications defeat it.
DeepFaceLab, behind ninety five percent of deepfakes, is free on GitHub. Voice cloning searches up a hundred twenty percent. Creating fakes gets easier while proving truth gets harder.
So we get the liar’s dividend. Dismiss any recording as fake. Politicians do this. “That video? Obviously AI.” Malaysia’s Prime Minister deepfaked for investment scams. Israel’s Channel 14 broadcast a deepfake Defense Minister from Iranian agents.
Businesses lost five hundred thousand average to deepfake fraud in 2024. Large enterprises, six hundred eighty thousand per incident. CEO fraud hits four hundred companies daily.
Banks spent billions on voice authentication. Useless now. Biometric bypass up seven hundred four percent. Document forgeries up two hundred forty four percent. Gartner says by 2026, thirty percent of enterprises won’t trust standalone verification.
The checkmark means nothing, watermarks strip easily, deepfakes everywhere. Want verification? Pay us. Submit ID, take selfies. Premium tier for better security.
Creating fakes costs nothing. Biden robocall cost one dollar, under twenty minutes. Creating lies is cheap. Proving truth is expensive.
Twitter’s paid verification got immediate impersonation. They verified dead people. Kobe, Chadwick Boseman, Khashoggi who was assassinated. Million followers got auto checked. Celebrities who criticized it got verified anyway. Musk paying personally.
Campaigns block Twitter Blue users now. The credibility badge became a scarlet letter.
Families use code words to verify calls. Organizations make you rotate your head on video to check for glitches.
We went from seeing is believing to needing expensive tech to trust our eyes. The people selling authentication broke the old trust systems by monetizing them.
Truth isn’t about what’s real. It’s about who can afford to prove it. Premium trust, freemium reality. Most dystopian subscription tier yet.
