If you’re a business with a gray verification badge on your Facebook page, you likely received a message saying the social media company will be removing these badges at the end of the month.
In case you haven’t received the message, it reads as follows:
We’re always working on better ways to help people understand more about the Pages they interact with. We introduced gray verification badges in 2015 to show which Pages for businesses and organizations are authentic.
However, we’ve found that they can be more confusing than helpful, so we’re removing them on October 29. As a result, there will no longer be a gray badge on [your business page]. This won’t impact the way the Page appears in search results.
To learn more about how to help people find a Page and verify that it’s real, please go to our best practices.
Thanks,
Facebook support message
The Facebook Pages Team
As you can see in the Facebook support message being sent out to business with the badge, Facebook thinks it is more confusing than helpful. To be honest, I find them useful, especially in this day and age of page spoofing and fake news. When I land on a business page with the verification badge, I know for a fact that it is very likely the official page for that business or organization. Without it, it will be hard to tell if a page is official or not.
For those of you with blue verification badges — for public figures, media companies, and brands — it seems like these will stay as we’ve heard no mention of them being removed. However, as mentioned above, the gray verification badge for businesses and organizations will be disappearing from Facebook pages on October 29th. It is interesting that Facebook is just removing them outright instead of replacing them with the blue verification badge to make things more consistent.
What do you think about Facebook’s decision to remove the gray verification badges from business and organization pages? Did you find them useful or confusing? Let us know in the comments below or on Twitter, Facebook, or MeWe.
Last Updated on February 3, 2021.
