Facebook, Twitter etc. have verified accounts. If you were adding this to your own application, how would you do it?<p>I imagine no matter how it's done, it will involve some amount of manual approval. I would be pleasantly surprised to learn that this can be automated.
I don't have a technical answer, but I would probably find out how online tobacco/vape companies verify people and implement that. They ask for taxpayer ID, credit card info, some other bits. It is fully automated and real-time verification.
As LinuxBender wrote (<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28274924" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28274924</a>), there are ways to do this<p>Credit card, SSN/tax ID, scans of Passport/ID card - some of this is done by online-only financial services (eg Petalcard)<p>There's also tools like DocuSign, multifactor authentication mechanisms (SMS + TOTP app + email, etc)<p>If the service/tool is only "supposed" to verify certain types of accounts, you might require the use of specific format email addresses, too (has to end .gov, .edu, nytimes.comm etc) - this can lend itself to <i>organizational</i> verification (gonna be harder to spoof (and therefore easier to verify) harvard.edu than blurblebuck.me)