It's really interesting. You've done some digging and received avoidance and opposition as a reaction - 😨. It just confirms suspicions. Digging into professional associations, universities, conference managers, publishers and so on and then conducting a video call interview cleared up suspicions in a case we recently had. Eventually, with famous personalities, some verificationon the steemit blog 'about me' section, is useful. Many writers and others don't like nor do they use Facebook anymore (and that verificaton can be faked anyway). Twitter is good, but hard to get done. We rested with AirBnB - it requires credit card, email, phone number, identity, and selfie to match the gvernment ID. If the person then goes on to actually use the AirBnB identity, gradually a fec-to-face reputation is built up each time his identity is checked when he books into a BnB.