14 DAY TRIAL // Facebook Pages are becoming increasingly valuable to the social network and to the brands or artists occupying them. But the social network is facing the same problem as Twitter – the number of impersonators who set up pages for groups they have no affiliation with. Facebook has been battling this problem and constantly removes the unofficial pages but now it's introducing some measures that will make it harder to create a false page in the first place, with new authentication tools asking Page owners to validate their affiliation.
The program was introduced last week apparently and Facebook has been contacting the owners of larger Pages and asking them to confirm their identity. The owners are contacted by email and they are directed to three ways of authenticating their identities.
“Add an email address that is officially affiliated with the entity of your Page to your personal Facebook account. You can also add the email address of a company authorized to manage your brand (e.g., management or PR firm),” is one option for the Page admins and it is pretty straightforward and fool-proof. Another option is to: “Add another admin to your Page who has an email address that is officially affiliated with the entity your Page represents.” This too is a run-of-the-mill authentication method.
Where it gets interesting, as InsideFacebook notes, is with the first option: “Add a badge or a Fan Box widget to your website that links to your Facebook Page.” This works well as it shows that the admin can access the content on the official website or make decisions to influence it but it also serves as a rather subversive way of getting Facebook on a website with a potentially large following and expose the Facebook Page as well as the social network itself to the users.
The new stricter authentication methods aren't likely to solve the problem entirely but they are a step in the right direction. Unfortunately, with 300 million users and as Facebook Pages become more popular and increasingly coveted, more and more problems are likely to creep up.