Again, it's a mix. In many automated anti-abuse systems, there are humans in the loop for training/verification. Like, take something that's trying to catch home rental ad scammers by running basically a spam classifier on the messages they send, except trained on scammy language, like "please send the security deposit to xyz, and I'll mail you the keys". But that classifier isn't perfect, and you probably don't want false positives banning legitimate users' accounts. So instead, it just leads to a temp suspension so that if they are a scammer (high likelihood, so this is fairly safe), and drops the message in a review queue, to be verified or reversed by a human reviewer. If it reverses, that's valuable training for the automated model.
If you're charging $8/mo/account, you can justify a lot more verification than if it's just an effort to keep the user base free of scammers for nebulous brand value reasons, and there are likely to be far fewer scams to moderate anyway, since it makes it a lot more expensive/risky to ramp up 10,000 accounts, which might all get banned at once if they identify commonalities between them.
Yeah maybe. I don't know, it still feels to me that "people should not trust verified accounts because they may be scams", and bad actors can still make 10k unverified accounts.
If people learn to trust verified accounts, it becomes a risk (they shouldn't, since it is not completely reliable / it was completely bad for Twitter), right? And if they don't learn to trust verified accounts, then scammers have no reason to pay for them.
If you're charging $8/mo/account, you can justify a lot more verification than if it's just an effort to keep the user base free of scammers for nebulous brand value reasons, and there are likely to be far fewer scams to moderate anyway, since it makes it a lot more expensive/risky to ramp up 10,000 accounts, which might all get banned at once if they identify commonalities between them.