A lawsuit was the final thing required to push twitter into launching verified accounts now. Twitter has been dealing with a lawsuit from St. Lous Cardinals Manager Tony La Russa. The lawsuit is about an individual impersonating La Russa on Twitter. Twitter still does not have any systematic way to verify if any tweets were real or bogus.
This seems to be the reason that Twitter has announced verified accounts beta program so they do not have to handle any future lawsuits for such reasons.
