One smart thing that Twitter has done in recent years is help show which accounts are run by actual celebrities and which ones are just impersonators. Twitter does this by labeling accounts as “verified”, a practice that Facebook just announced it has now begun to do.
Verified accounts on Facebook will be displayed the same way as they are on Twitter, with a small blue checkmarked circle next to the page’s name. Users will be able to see whether an account is verified or not from the page’s timeline, from Facebook’s search results, as well as from other areas of the site.
Users won’t be able to request that their page be verified, rather Facebook will now be going through and individually verifying profiles and pages that have a high number of subscribers or likes and that have been confirmed to be real. Facebook has actually been doing this for a few months now, however, it previously didn’t mark pages with a “verified” logo, it simply would rank them higher in search results.
The feature is a much needed one from Facebook, as until now, a search result for a musician or actor could turn up several different page results, all with a relatively same number of likes. Now users will be able to tell which is the official page they should be visiting and which ones they should be ignoring.
