[BitwiseFool]

It seems to me that "being verified" means you shouldn't get to change your Twitter display name without undergoing another review process. I don't think the whole idea of charging for verification is now a discredited idea because of these past events.

[fragmede]

The idea is fine, the issue is that verification is a hard problem to solve properly in an automated fashion and with actual money on the line, you can be sure there will be motivated attackers, trying to abuse the system. So you hire a small army of human contractors to do manual verification on top of automated systems. Except someone went and fired 80% of that team over the weekend.