Substack’s Secret Verified Badges: An Exposé

How the Platform Quietly Created a Two-Tier System for Celebrities

When Dolly Parton launched her Substack in early November 2025, eagle-eyed users noticed something unusual next to her name: a black and white, slightly gray, verification checkmark that doesn’t appear in any of the platform’s official documentation. Not the new flowery badges from last month. Nor an orange fringe badge for hundreds of paid subscribers, nor deep orange for thousands, nor purple for tens of thousands. Just a simple checkmark in grayscale, the kind that whispers “celebrity” without ever having to prove it.

It’s a badge that, officially, is inexplicable. Like it doesn’t exist.

Search Substack’s help center for information about this verification badge and you’ll find nothing. The company’s support pages mention only two groupings of three badges: the colored Bestseller checkmarks (white, orange, and purple) earned by building a paid subscriber base, and the gray flower badges (4 petals, 5 petals, and 7 petals) for readers who support other newsletters. There’s no category for celebrity verification. No announcement. No explanation of criteria. No transparency about who gets one or why.

Yet there it is, clearly visible on her profile, and an increasing but niche handful of other celebrities. Lest we think this is just about Parton, beloved country queen, we can find similar examples in the form of Pete Buttigieg, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and Julia Louis-Dreyfus. All public figures who’ve recently joined the platform. Curiouser and curiouser.

And this isn’t the first time Substack has made changes without telling its writer community. But given that trend, this latest omission reveals something more troubling: Substack’s developed a pattern of surreptitiously changing the platform without transparency. In this case by quietly created a two-tier verification system that gives celebrities instant credibility without requiring they demonstrate the same audience engagement expected of regular creators.

An Imposter Problem That Wasn’t

To understand why this matters, we need to examine the justification social medua platforms typically offers for verification systems. When Twitter first rolled out its blue checkmark badges in the early 2010s, it was to combat impersonators pretending to be celebrities or name brands. When people see the blue tick, they’d know this account was confirmed to be the person by Twitter corporate. But is celebrity impersonation actually a problem on Substack?

The platform has had a scammer here and there, often in the form of fake service providers like “The Literary Curator” who stole author testimonials. But these aren’t celebrity impersonators confusing readers about authentic accounts. Compare this to the scale of the problem that verification was designed to solve on established social platforms: Instagram was flooded with over 1,300 fake Selena Gomez accounts and more than 700 fake Beyoncé accounts. Facebook found millions of parody or imposter accounts in the 2010s.

Where’s the comparable data for Substack? It doesn’t exist.

That’s because Substack, despite its growth, isn’t yet the kind of platform where celebrity impersonation runs rampant. It’s still outside the top tier of social media networks. The imposter crisis that plagued Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook as they scaled? Substack hasn’t reached that point. More importantly, Substack already has a solution for establishing authenticity: the Bestseller badge.

Ain’t Broke, Don’t Fix It

Here’s what makes the celebrity verification badge particularly galling: any celebrity who wanted social proof on Substack could earn it the same way everyone else does: getting paid subscribers. An easy feat for anyone with an existing media presence.

The basic Bestseller badge—the entry-level verification, of sorts—requires only about 100 paid subscribers. Not 1,000. Not even 200. Just 100 people willing to pay for your newsletter.

Think about that. Parton, with her millions of fans. Buttigieg, with 708,000+ Substack subscribers. Gordon-Levitt, with 394,000+ subscribers. Any of them could direct a tiny fraction of their existing audience to become paid subscribers and earn a white badge within hours.

That’s the entire point of Substack’s badge system, as stated in their November 2022 announcement: “Paying readers, not Substack, decide who gets a badge. We don’t give out these badges for subjective reasons and they can’t be bought. They are assigned solely according to how many paid subscribers a writer has on Substack.”

The Bestseller badge is supposed to measure something real: whether an audience values your work enough to pay for it. It’s democratic. It’s measurable. It rewards the “deep relationships” over corporate capricious. The things that Substack claims to champion.

So why create a separate verification system for celebrities that bypasses this entirely?

A Pattern of Opacity

The undocumented celebrity badge fits a troubling pattern of changes Substack has made over the past 16 months without adequate transparency:

The Gray Flower Badges (September 2025): Substack rolled out badges showing users’ paid subscription status with minimal announcement. Writers complained that the feature made their subscription history “instantly viewable” without warning, raising privacy concerns. Users scrambled to find privacy settings that Substack hadn’t proactively explained.

Algorithm Changes to Notes (Throughout 2024-2025): Constant, undocumented tweaks to what content gets promoted. Writers reported subscriber growth dropping “80-90% in 2025 due to algorithm bias toward big names.” One creator’s Notes engagement “nosedived off a cliff” in September 2024 with no explanation. The algorithm appeared to heavily favor writing “about Substack” type content, then abruptly pivoted. As one frustrated writer put it: “I don’t understand the logic of boosting writing-related Notes that much, unless of course these Notes lead to more paid subscribers than personal Notes, which would make more business sense for Substack.”

Leaderboard Criteria Changes (Ongoing): The ranking system that can make or break discoverability shifts without documentation. Update frequency changed from every few hours to daily with no clear communication. Writers complained that Substack corporate doesn’t spell out what the criteria is to even place on the leaderboard. The result? Hourly ranking fluctuations that create anxiety and confusion.

Discovery Tool Removal: Substack killed its “new posts made in real time” page—a feature writers used regularly for discovery—and replaced it with an algorithm-based leaderboard without community input.

The through-line is clear: Substack makes changes that significantly impact writers lives and careers on the platform, but does not explain itself. Or only does so belatedly. This pattern of limited, often retrospective documentation and communication is troubling.

Hidden Tax — Costs from a Lack of Transparency

This approach exacts a real cost on the writer community. When algorithm changes aren’t announced, creators waste time and energy trying to reverse-engineer what changed. When privacy features roll out without explanation, users feel their data has been exposed. When leaderboard criteria remain opaque, writers can’t make informed strategic decisions. And when celebrity verification badges appear without documentation, it sends an odd message about who matters on the platform.

The irony is thick. Substack positions itself as the anti-algorithm, anti-corporate alternative to traditional social media. Its founders regularly criticize platforms that prioritize attention-maximizing algorithms and lack transparency. The company’s blog posts wax philosophical about “putting writers and readers in charge” and building “a new media ecosystem based on respecting, rather than exploiting, people’s attention.”

Yet here’s Substack doing exactly what it claims to oppose: creating hidden hierarchies, making unilateral changes without consultation, and building systems that favor those who arrive with existing power and fame. It’s fine to grow the community, and to make updates, but these should be spelled out, surely?

And on the subject of transparency, why does the explainer graphic associated with the badges look different on the app versus on the desktop version of the platform? The app version reads “[blank] is a Verified Creator. This account owns [blank] on Instagram.” (Why Instagram, and by extension Meta, have been tagged in to help determine legitimacy is also a question.) The current version desktop simply shows the gray verified badge in a motion graphic and lists the associated Instagram account below it.

What This Really Means

The celebrity verification badge reveals what Substack actually prioritizes. It’s a rational business decision, of course. Celebrity Substacks generate press coverage. They bring new users to the platform. Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s February 2025 launch of “Joe’s Journal” earned coverage from Yahoo Entertainment and Air Mail. Charli XCX’s November announcement made headlines at The Fader and Uproxx. This is free marketing in a real sense.

But it undermines the platform’s stated values. If verification can be granted based on outside fame rather than demonstrated Substack engagement, what does that say about the Bestseller badges that thousands of writers work for months or years to earn?

Those writers—the ones publishing consistently, building communities, converting readers to paid subscribers through quality and trust—are the ones who made Substack viable. They’re the creators who believed in the platform’s promise of a more democratic media ecosystem. And now they’re watching Substack create a VIP lane that bypasses the very metrics the platform claims matter most.

The Questions Substack Won’t Answer

Journalists like myself have reached out to Substack for comment about the celebrity verification badges. As of my publishing this article today, the company has not gone on record with anyone to my knowledge.

That silence is perhaps the most revealing aspect of this story. A platform built on the promise of transparency, one that regularly publishes blog posts about its philosophy and values, apparently has nothing to say about a verification system it’s actively using but refuses to document.

Here are the questions Substack should answer:

• What are the criteria for receiving a gray verification badge?

• What does Instagram, and its parent Meta, play here?

• How many people have been granted these badges?

• Why was this system created?

• Why no public announcement?

• Why isn’t it documented in help files or support pages?

• How does this badge system align with the stated value that “paying readers, not Substack, decide who gets a badge”?

The celebrity influx to Substack isn’t inherently problematic. Pete Buttigieg, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Jimmy Carr, and others joining the platform could enrich the ecosystem. They bring different perspectives and audiences. But they should play by the same rules as everyone else.

This is in fact how it used to work, the very year the Bestseller badges were introduced. Plenty of public figures who either had accounts already, or newly took an interest, could earn a basic Bestseller badge higher with paid subscribers in a single afternoon. If Carr’s subscribers value his work, converting a fraction of them to paid would demonstrate real platform engagement. That would be verification, really social proof, that actually means something.

Instead, Substack has chosen to grant status based on external fame, creating exactly the kind of hierarchical, opaque system it claims to reject. And it’s doing so without the clarity that its own stated values demand.

For a platform that loves to talk about putting power in the hands of readers and writers, that’s a remarkable about-face. The question now is whether Substack will own up to what it’s built—or continue pretending that we can’t see what they won’t talk about.

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Have you noticed other undocumented changes to Substack? I’d love to hear from writers who’ve experienced sudden shifts in visibility, engagement, or platform features. The more we share information, the harder it is for platforms to make changes in the dark.