In my view, a sentence using "favorite" as a verb is already clunky and inelegant - and American. However, I can see you are in a difficult editorial position if you are going to use articles which contain internet-speak.
I don't see it as a difficulty. Many nouns become verbs through common use and eventually take hold in more formal language despite resistance.
Ask yourself this: are you resisting the usage on strong grammatical grounds, or simply because it's a neologism?
For reasons I can't explain I was disturbed last night by the verb to trouser (as in "Karl trousered a massive wedge before the bubble burst"*). I was trying to think of the correct verb and could only come up with 'pocketed' which verb, I speculate, someone wrote a similar complaint about 20 or so years ago.
(*I say "as in" as if this is a well known expression. Really, I just made it up for this post, but that's not to say that no one has ever said/written it before. Please feel free to
google type it into a search engine to check if you wish.)