Crummy Buzzfeed content drones with 5000 followers are getting verified.

Verification ticks are just a badge of being well connected, and approved. And having your tick removed is a way of saying that you have stepped out of line.

That's what worries me about verified. It's just a form of nepotism at the end of the day and they certainly prefer certain niches (Hollywood, Silicon Valley, the media industry, etc..) over others.

Also seems verified is fairly correlated with certain political ideologies - kind of feels like twitter is trying to direct conversation without taking responsibility for bias.

That sounds like the usual persecution complex of the anti establishment/alt right. If that where the case, Twitter would be very shitty at such job, since countless of them are verified. Notably including alex jones up to his ban.

Journalists of major publications and celebrities are pretty evenly verified. Maybe it's just the circles I follow, but I encounter a lot of random 'liberal centrist with a podcast who has written 2 op eds'-types that seem to be more famous on twitter than anywhere else.

People with the right connections are getting verified.

They still do it when they want to.

It's open, it's just that they no longer accept public requests.