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Twitter forces all new users to enter a valid phone number

sucky.ninja

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Re: Twitter forces all new users to enter a valid phone number

#321

Post by braythwayt »

oska wrote: post #246
braythwayt wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is, you might say, not just an important problem in society, but the only problem in society. "Why do I need a driver's license? It's just bureaucracy and a revenue collection scam." Except, when you don't test drivers or provide a mechanism for taking bad drivers off the road, a few bad people spoil it for everyone. And so on, and so forth. That is not a justification for any one thing like this, but the genera…

> "Why do I need a driver's license? It's just bureaucracy and a revenue collection scam." Except, when you don't test drivers or provide a mechanism for taking bad drivers off the road, a few bad people spoil it for everyone. This is an atrocious analogy. The reason we require licenses for motor vehicles is that they are very dangerous pieces of machinery that can easily do fatal damage to car occupants and pedestri…

Think through this analogy a little more thoroughly. Freedom of speech is an important issue precisely because it’s dangerous. Speech can ignite revolutions against unjust tyrants, and speech can also mobilize hate and terrorism.

Speech is not without consequence to society. If it was not dangerous to the lives and property of others, it wouldn’t matter so much.

I think the argument that speech is less dangerous than the right to drive a car is naïve and uninformed by both history and what we see in plain sight.

I mean seriously, can you look at white supremacist terrorisms radicalized online and tell me that speech has no consequences?

Of course it has consequences. If speech didn’t have consequences, it wouldn’t be worth defending.

———

But even if you refuse to accept that speech is dangerous, you must accept that it has consequences, that it can affect the experience of other people.

If it didn’t, there wouldn’t be a need to moderate speech on this very platform. Everyone could post anything they like. It would be more like... Maybe the right to park your car on a busy street during rush hour.

Nobody will slam into your car, but it will certainly affect their use of a common resource.

Unrestricted use of a common resource leads to a tragedy of the commons, and nobody ends up enjoying it except the vermin, who reduce each other’s enjoyment to the barest minimum.

Re: Twitter forces all new users to enter a valid phone number

#322

Post by PinguTS »

They are requiring a mobile phone number for some time now even when not on VPN, TOR and alike.

This is very worrying that more and more services are requiring a mobile number, especially for services that are used with business background. That means, in your business you need to have a business mobile. You need to track who registered with what phone number and so on. Email accounts are much easier to manage. But mobile numbers is a big problem, especially when employees leave and mobiles get deactivated.

Re: Twitter forces all new users to enter a valid phone number

#323

Post by nyuszika7h »

_jomo wrote: post #25

They have been doing this for any account registered from a VPN or Tor. However, you can simply appeal the block and tell them you haven't tweeted and not broken any rules. They will send you an automated mail, offering to validate your phone number, or reply to the mail if your problem is not solved. Just reply to the mail. Unfortunately, processing the request takes anywhere between 10 minutes and 2 weeks; usually…

You don't even need to use a VPN or Tor, this happens often for pretty much any account registered from a residential IP as well.

This is the form you have to use: https://help.twitter.com/forms/general?subtopic=suspended

Re: Twitter forces all new users to enter a valid phone number

#324

Post by nyuszika7h »

TheGrumpyBrit wrote: post #297
ams6110 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are running a business on Twitter, I don't see a big issue with having a phone number connected to that Twitter account. It doesn't strike me as unreasonable.

Depends on the business, and whether there's a limit to the number of accounts a number can be linked to. A business can quite legitimately have multiple accounts for different departments, brands, or any other purpose. If you can only have one account per phone number, that can quickly become a problem.

Their help page claims a phone number can be linked to 10 accounts at once, but in practice I've found that limit to be 4 or even less. Also, they often prevent a number from being added to more accounts for a few days or weeks even if you remove it from all accounts.

Re: Twitter forces all new users to enter a valid phone number

#325

Post by [deleted] »

detaro wrote: post #296
medof wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Many places I've been won't let you buy a SIM without showing id. You don't need to show any ID in Europe to buy non-contract phone number. You can go into most stores and get free or pay 1-5 euro for a phone number.

And then you typically need to do some kind of identity verification to activate it.

[deleted]

Re: Twitter forces all new users to enter a valid phone number

#326

Post by nyuszika7h »

Vinnl wrote: post #298
_jomo wrote: post #25

They have been doing this for any account registered from a VPN or Tor. However, you can simply appeal the block and tell them you haven't tweeted and not broken any rules. They will send you an automated mail, offering to validate your phone number, or reply to the mail if your problem is not solved. Just reply to the mail. Unfortunately, processing the request takes anywhere between 10 minutes and 2 weeks; usually…

I think this process was the first actual change in my behaviour I noticed in response to GDPR: I actually did not mind providing my phone number that much, and trusted that they actually deleted it when I requested them to (using an option in the interface) after my account was re-approved.

They definitely do not delete it entirely because sometimes a phone number is prevented from being added to more accounts for a few days or weeks, saying "This phone number is already registered with another account" even if it's been already deleted from all accounts, though they may be just storing a hash of the number that's not linked to any user account.

Re: Twitter forces all new users to enter a valid phone number

#327

Post by Komodoro »

Its a bit weird complaining about a platform asking for your phone number when in the past tweeter worked only via sms. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter#Format Lucky those that created their accounts early on. Forcing us to put more data then what is needed should be banned from any social platform. I really don't get any of this eager race to collect all personal data possible. Google is already on to us with Chrome and Android. If people were really afraid of this they wouldn't even buy phones, do phone calls (from land line) or even send a personal registered mail (it could be violated). Hell, trust no one with your secrets. Don't even write it in a diary, someone may reconstruct it even after you burn it to ashes (I see a lot of CSI). Still good to be updated on this.

Re: Twitter forces all new users to enter a valid phone number

#328

Post by lmm »

kingaillas wrote: post #271
gotocake wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Instead of attacking the person who is making a fairly lengthy and supportable argument, and basing your stance on the notion of some nebulous value “people” find, maybe you could respond in kind? I have to say that I find myself in the camp of Twitter being silly, except when it’s being destructive. Instead of being dismissed as “empty-headed” I’d prefer some value proposition justifying the previous comparison to a…

Twitter is a Rorschach test - all those things you criticize Twitter for seeming to be (rage factory, shitty blog, etc.)? That would be entirely the fault of the users in those specific circumstances. The value proposition for me is receiving targeted news/information disseminated in a convenient format. As a concrete example, I'm crewing/pacing at a 100 mile trail run in two weeks, and I'm subscribed to that event's…

> The value proposition for me is receiving targeted news/information disseminated in a convenient format. As a concrete example, I'm crewing/pacing at a 100 mile trail run in two weeks, and I'm subscribed to that event's twitter feed. It's the Umstead 100 in case you are curious (@Umstead100). During the event, it will tweet out news and updates of interest to participants, volunteers, and others.

> Yes, they could probably text everyone, or continuously update the website, or send emails - but Twitter is perfect for this situation and others like it: content/updates produces and consumed on mobile devices, sending frequent short updates with relevant info, etc.

Twitter is a poor choice for cases where you want to specifically subscribe to something, because it's deliberately designed as a global popularity contest/rage generator. A Facebook group, Discord, heck even Tumblr or Medium would be a better choice for that kind of use than Twitter.

> Twitter has its abuses, but so does everything. Next time you're ready to shit all over Twitter, just remember that what you are likely ACTUALLY raging about is their userbase, i.e. the public.

No, Twitter has a series of deliberate design decisions that result in worse interactions than any other platform. The limited message size strips away nuance and reasoned discussion, in favour of zingers and outrage. Their algorithmic feed shows the most "engaging" tweets while suppressing the follow-up discussion, so you'll see a controversial tweet without seeing the existing replies or subsequent retraction. The rage storms aren't just people being people, they're people being nudged into behaving a particular way by Twitter's optimized-for-engagement UI. There's a reason other platforms don't have these problems.

Re: Twitter forces all new users to enter a valid phone number

#329

Post by ryanlol »

dragonwriter wrote: post #276
joering2 wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It won’t do. Twilio (and basically majority of other virtual number providers, except of very tiny few located in Europe) do not provide regular cell-type text messaging capabilities, but rather something PBX pros call “short codes”. No self-respecting provider out there, be it Twitter Facebook, Gmail, Yahoo, Instagram, etc. will deliver your confirmation info via a short code. so you need regular ported cell number…

> Twilio (and basically majority of other virtual number providers, except of very tiny few located in Europe) do not provide regular cell-type text messaging capabilities, but rather something PBX pros call “short codes”. Twilio provides both regular phone numbers with SMS and MMS capability and short codes, the latter primarily for high-volume outbound messaging.

The regular twilio numbers still (mostly) aren’t going to work for this stuff.

Re: Twitter forces all new users to enter a valid phone number

#330

Post by j16sdiz »

ALittleLight wrote: post #177
banana_giraffe wrote: post #43

The article states and asks: > I had a new IP > I had a newly installed operating system and browser. > What exactly about my behavior is unusual? It's not that this behavior is unusual (though, it is), it's that this behavior looks exactly like a bot. It's sad, but this is the state of the world now. If you're a big actor like Twitter, you end up blocking anything that looks like a bot, with an escape hatch a user c…

Why not just captchas and a classifier looking for bots in the sign up process? That, plus better detection and removal of bots seems like a "good enough" option that wouldn't inconvenience real users.

Captcha factory are cheap. You can find people solving 1000 recaptcha for $2.99, with API access.
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