Wow the comments here are very bitter. What do people have against people wanting to be verified for who they really are? For press this is important, so you know you're talking to the right person.
Was always surprised there was no independent website/source for this (Hey, my name is X, my details are at example.com/1234 if you want to find how to contact me).
Independent objective press is important. Even press which is honest about its bias is important.
The miserable excuse for "press" which the corporate media is is important only in the sense that they are one of the main drivers behind the polarisation in society. Most of the big corporate press outlets - cable, broadcast and their internet arms - are not much more than thinly veiled propaganda outlets for the Democrats or Republicans - pity the poor soul who gets his view on the state of the world from one of these merchants of outrage.
Blue-check "journalists" who work for these outlets tend to produce narrative instead of news, aiming to stoke the fervour of their intended targets. Instead of a blue check it would be good to mark them with a red flag, 'warning: exposure has been shown to lead to distorted views of reality'.
Hence an independent source would be great. I should have stated I don't believe the existing Twitter verification system is good, nor is the proposed (now active?) one. I don't know what a good solution is, apart from a directory.. which would probably be hacked..
The issue is that the unverified ones are basically the rest of the pool of Mastodon users. Let's put this to an extreme: if Mastodon were the only way to communicate, how would you trust a name over another, identical name?
> For press this is important, so you know you're talking to the right person.
That presumes their tweets are important. That's what twitter wants them to feel, the purpose of checkmarks on twitter is to make them feel important. If a journalist has something actually important to say, let them publish it and let their publisher confirm their identity. The byline on a New York Times article can be trusted, it doesn't need some dumb little check symbol next to the name.
The tweets of somebody with articles in the New York Times are not important. When a journalist tweets, they bypass the mechanisms and customs which would normally make what a journalist says important, namely their editors. The apparent importance that tweeting has is an illusory sensation cynically engineered by twitter, to the detriment of society.
Was always surprised there was no independent website/source for this (Hey, my name is X, my details are at example.com/1234 if you want to find how to contact me).