How do you handle organization verification?

Question

Facebook, Twitter etc. have verified accounts. If you were adding this to your own application, how would you do it?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.

LinuxBender · Accepted Answer

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.

warrenm · Answer

As LinuxBender wrote (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28274924), there are ways to do this
Credit card, SSN/tax ID, scans of Passport/ID card - some of this is done by online-only financial services (eg Petalcard)
There's also tools like DocuSign, multifactor authentication mechanisms (SMS + TOTP app + email, etc)
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 organizational verification (gonna be harder to spoof (and therefore easier to verify) harvard.edu than blurblebuck.me)