According to NDTV, to check the spread of fake news, malicious content and misinformation, social media platforms may soon have to scramble to develop an account identity-verification option.

The IT Minister is learned to have finished the social media guidelines to check issues like misinformation and have sent it to the Law ministery to examine where account holder verification could be made mandatory.

The new draft personal data protection bill has proposed social media intermediaries to enable voluntary verification of social accounts. For this, the bill suggests that all the users should be given a visible mark after a biometric or physical identification.

This is not the first time there have been talks of implementing such rules. Earlier, there was a proposal to link social media accounts with Aadhaar to trail the source of fake news, however, the nodal agency for UIDAI shot down the proposal by saying that Aadhaar is not meant for catching culprits.

Later, IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said that there is no proposal to link the social media accounts to Aadhaar. If this is implemented, then this verification system would be different from the current verified accounts category on social media platforms.