Facebook will soon make some of its
most influential accounts verify that they are who they say they are.
New rules will require Facebook pages
with a "large audience" to verify their location or else they will be
barred from publishing new posts, the company announced Friday.
The company plans to start notifying
affected Facebook accounts today. When Facebook flags an account as needing to
go through this additional authorization process, account holders will have a
few weeks to provide proof of their location (by activating location services
on their phones) and enable two-factor authentication on the account.
Once verified, users will be able to
view the country where page admins are located on any given page. "Our
goal here is to make it even harder to administer a page with a fake
account," Facebook's director of product marketing, Emma Rodgers, says of
the changes.
Facebook isn't saying just how large a
page's audience has to be for it to trigger the additional review, but Rodgers
says for now the company is focusing on accounts whose audience is primarily in
the U.S. Additionally, certain types of accounts will be exempt from the rule:
pages that are already verified, or who have a "managed relationship"
with Facebook (i.e., a sales team that works directly with the company).
Instagram will also implement similar
changes "in the coming weeks," according to Facebook.
The move is just the latest way the
social network is trying to restrict pages run by shady accounts that spread
misinformation. Previously, Facebook implemented
tools that let people view ads a given page has run. Now, it's trying
to prevent the circumstances that allowed Russia-backed accounts to mount an
influence campaign to meddle in U.S. elections.
More importantly, the change could
actually help Facebook limit the reach of pages run by fake accounts that it
hasn't already detected.
It's not clear when or if the social
network could expand these new rules to pages outside the U.S., but Rodgers
says the company plans to learn from the initial process before moving forward
in other places.
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