That Julian Assange isn't verified yet is an absolute joke.
Whatever else you think about him, he is still a person of significant influence in the world, and there are dozens of fake accounts pretending to be his that regularly fool news outlets.
This is the very use case that the verification system was designed for, and yet still no verification.
Nope, he's tried (and has been trying for a while [0]), and he regularly calls Twitter out for it and the trouble it causes him due to news outlets getting confused by impersonators.
Ive noticed a lot of random business people seem to be verified. It’s become a meaningless (or negative) signal for me. Basically it says: I know someone at Twitter!
Eh, I understand why it made sense to denote official accounts of well-known people and organizations in Twitter's early days, and also why it doesn't make sense anymore.
The culture of the platform and the world it exists in have changed, why shouldn't policy change to reflect that?
People understand the platform better, no need to lure famous people to the site, there are other ways to verify (e.g., link to twitter account on web page), many more people across the spectrum of "famous" so it's hard to button down who/what is famous enough for the checkmark, global audience means famous in one place != famous in another, no consistency in how verified actually works, verified accounts became Star-Bellied Sneetches, etc.
The verified system isn't about luring people to the site, it's about making sure certain accounts can't be impersonated.
The problem is that Twitter doesn't verify consistently, but it's is still an important feature, e.g. Imagine the mischief that could be caused if there was no way to tell which of several accounts was the real Donald Trump.
Except that you would know which account was the real Donald Trump, because Donald Trump would be on TV telling you so.
Extremely well-known figures have other ways to let you know which account is theirs. The harder set of people are the sort of low-to-medium famous. Or locally famous, not globally famous. The verified system has never worked well for that group anyway.
And yet every other week there's another news outlet publishing tweets from "Julian Assange" that aren't actually from Julian Assange (here's one from last week [0]), because twitter refuses to verify him and the people copying his account do it very well.
Now imagine that at the presidential level. No thanks.
The historical problem with the Twitter verified system is they used it as the database of accounts you may want to follow when you joined. Those are really two different things.
Whatever else you think about him, he is still a person of significant influence in the world, and there are dozens of fake accounts pretending to be his that regularly fool news outlets.
This is the very use case that the verification system was designed for, and yet still no verification.