Facebook will make accounts with a ‘large audience’ verify home addresses

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 home address 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 address to Facebook 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” wth 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.