Been talking to people at work about this whole verification thing and I was pointed to this really interesting specification for "trust.txt" -- basically a "robots.txt" and I could imagine it augmenting the rel=me thing that Mastodon already does. nytimes dot com could list their associated journalists' social media at this endpoint and Mastodon could do a handshake with that, similar to what it does with rel=me

https://journallist.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/trust.txt-specification-v-1-1.pdf