"I provide government ID to exactly three classes of people..."
Not sure where you're living, but in most countries you also need to provide ID to your landlord to rent a place, to utilities providers to get for example mobile phone contract etc. It's also fairly common practice to ask for each others ID when making a high-value private sale eg second-hand car.
I agree with the skepticism of providing ID to a social media site... but if there are people who want their social media sites to have verified identities, they somehow need to provide this themselves.
I wonder if a fairly trusted institution such as a bank could set that up as a 3rd-party provided service, similar to a credit card network for example.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
