Curious if anyone knows what the process might look like for verifying a public figure, for example the blue checkmark on X/instagram or an artist profile on spotify. From reading the docs it sounds like it’s just meeting some criteria and getting reviewed by a team but that doesn’t explain how the teams would know for sure that this account represents so and so.
I believe the phrase i’m going to use is “preponderance of evidence”.
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Maybe like how Google verifies you own a domain by you placing a verification code on your website.
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I would be curious OP, how you think you could know “for sure”. What evidence could be guaranteed to be true?
Emails can be spoofed;
Images can be deepfaked;
Lookalikes could present themselves in person;
etc etc.
At some point, it comes down to someone (or something) somewhere deciding “good enough for me”.
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Here’s the X criteria, in case you haven’t seen it. Add “pays $3/month” to the requirements, but essentially it’s back to “preponderance of evidence” 
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Its there, just not overtly in the bulleted list: “Has an active X Premium subscription”…
Bulleted lists… always a great distraction for the quick read…
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I suppose I assumed. It seems to me that for all the people out there doing chaotic stuff like faking celebrity news and creating deepfakes that you’d see more accounts hijacking the verified status if it just came down to “most likely”. The points you made are exactly the reason I came here to ask; I couldn’t figure a “good enough” way. You must be right as the criteria’s sometimes mention that the application would be reviewed by a team… Which must mean “preponderance of evidence”. How terribly unsatisfactory though yeah? haha.
Ah yes of course. I didn’t include it in my list because the implementation I was hoping for didn’t include such a $3/month. It makes sense though, if you can’t automate the task then you need a team which means you need to pay the team and probably skim some off the top for yourself too sooo… the supposed 420,000 verified X accounts * $3 / month = ~1.3 million xD
I mean, the news had enough stories of people faking being other accounts while having a blue checkmark… it happens. Even when you do get ‘verified’, accounts get hacked all the time… shrug
It does come down to how much time and effort (and as you yourself pointed out, all of that translates into money) the company in question is willing to put into verification - and how many hoops people are willing to jump through to meet those thresholds. There does come a point at which enough people stop finding it worthwhile to pursue from both ends.