Facebook will now start verifying the identities of people with individual profiles that have a larger audience in the US, the company said on Thursday.

“In 2018, we started to verify the identity of people managing pages with large audiences, and now we’re extending ID verification to some profiles with large audiences in the US,” Facebook wrote in a blog post.

The move is to ensure that the identities behind these accounts that have gone viral in the US are real and not bots. The social media platform will verify the identities of profiles displaying “inauthentic behaviour.”

“Moving forward, we will verify the identity of people who have a pattern of inauthentic behaviour on Facebook and whose posts start to rapidly go viral in the US,” Facebook said.

The tech giant will limit the reach of people with a wider audience if they fail to provide identification, or if their identification does not match their individual Facebook accounts “so fewer people will see it.“

Apart from this, if the person holding the individual profile is an admin of a particular page, they will need to complete Page Publishing Authorization. The Page admin will not be able to post from their pages until their account is verified through Facebook’s Page Publisher Authorization process.

This is part of the social media’s broader attempts to curb the spread of misinformation on its platform and to prevent misuse of the platform.

In 2018, Facebook had mandated identity verification for political-leaning advertisers, the Verge reported. It further expanded its identity verification policy for political advertisers in 2019, asking them to provide further information, including government-issued ID numbers before placing ads on the platform, it said.

“IDs will be stored securely and won’t be shared on the person’s profile,” Facebook added.

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