After experimenting with it over the past few months, Meta’s now rolling out its new Meta Verified comment filter on Instagram, providing another way to prioritize engagement from celebrities and people who’ve paid for verification in the app.

As you can see in this example, shared by creator economy expert Lia Haberman, some users are now seeing a new comment filter option in the app, which enables you to sort post comments based on algorithmic filtering, or by Meta Verified, so you can more specifically engage with users who have a blue checkmark account.

Which would have some value for paying subscribers, in giving them an extra level of exclusivity through a dedicated sorting option. But for regular users and creators, maybe not so much. 

In theory, paying Meta Verified users are more likely to be actual humans, because bot accounts can’t and won’t pay. So as per Elon Musk’s push on subscriptions, the idea could be that by prioritizing paying accounts, you can better ensure that you’re not dealing with bots and spammers, which could help you prioritize your engagement.

It could also help creators to facilitate relationships with more influential users in the app, as they’re either going to be celebrities, who’ve been granted a blue tick from IG, or people who are willing to pay for it. Which, presumably, would be users that are looking to build their IG following.

So there may be opportunities there, but not sure it has a heap of value as a sorting tool.

As noted, Instagram’s been developing the option over the past few months, with initial versions of it spotted in the app as far back as October, on both Facebook and IG.

It seems now that more people are getting access. So maybe that’s something worth checking out, and seeing which blue tick accounts are commenting on your posts. Maybe you don’t care.

It does seem like a lesser element in Meta’s broader verification product, but it could lead to new opportunities for collaboration and exposure.

The new comment sorting option is seemingly being rolled out in stages – we’ve asked IG for more info and will update this post if/when we hear back.

UPDATE (2/15): Meta has clarified that the feature is currently only in testing, with no plans to roll it out to all users at this stage.