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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

#241

Post by throwaway5r09 »

rdbell wrote: post #167
H1Supreme wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I do have a Google voice number, but I noticed one or two places recently that won't accept that anymore. Mind sharing where? I've use my Google Voice number exclusively for 6 or 7 years now. Can't say I've ever ran into such a thing.

Craigslist is one recent example that I came across.

Another is Credit Karma. And others have said Zelle no longer allows it.

Would love if someone made a list so those that have moved to VoIP wouldn’t need to waste time.

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

#242

Post by BroEconomics »

darkpuma wrote: post #42
matthewmacleod wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, you know… propaganda.

When the NYT is cheer-leading for the next foreign war, will they get kicked off Twitter to? I sincerely doubt it. America's newspaper of record has a track record of being wrong during the onset of wars, parroting whatever Washington tells them is true, then eating crow much later and apologizing for. The most recent case was the aid truck fire in Venezuela, which it took them weeks to correct. You've also got WMDs…

You have to understand when people say "propaganda" they mean "the wrong propaganda". If it is mainstream pushed propaganda, then it is acceptable.

Sheesh, look at this russia probe that was pushed for 2+ years and it comes out it is all fake news. Look at the Iraq war and Weapons of Mass Destruction.

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

#243

Post by numbsafari »

munk-a wrote: post #77
numbsafari wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I worked in banking we would do this with suspect transactions. The feature was called “Strategic Delay”. After awhile, all of our project plans (this was back in the days of Gantt charts) would include two weeks of effort on “Strategic Delay”, even if that feature wasn’t involved.

This is slightly different though, twitter is silly and unnecessary - access to your money is not. During some of the recent shows highlighting issues with payday lending these sorts of strategic delays were mentioned in the light that they can cause irregularly paid workers to have problems actually getting money out of their paycheck - forcing them into more borrowing until they are able to clear their checks. Agai…

You assume didn’t weigh them? This was practically two decades ago, but I can assure you weren’t flagging payroll transactions. Typically we were flagging obvious cases of wire fraud.

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

#244

Post by sadris »

miguelmota wrote: post #234
apo wrote: post #86

Linking pseudonyms from two different networks (in this case, Twitter and the phone system) together is a classic and serious privacy leak. It's far from clear exactly what information Twitter, in its longtime effort to combat spam, has already collected on its users. Throwing a phone number into the mix expands to range of activities that can be unambiguously tied to the same individual. Given that Twitter certainly…

Agree with the sentiment but what better alternative do you propose to prevent abuse?

Require a deposit to sign up. If you quit you get it back. If you get banned you lose it.

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

#246

Post by oska »

braythwayt wrote: post #62
_jomo wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to ignore that this constrains abusers as much as it does legitimate users. Collective punishment in order to mitigate abuse by a few is the wrong way to go.

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 pedestrians, as well as property damage. Likening such a domain with that of communication and speech (what we're discussing here) is ridiculous.

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

#247

Post by manfredo »

I'm seeing conspicuous parallels with YikYak. YikYak was facing an abusive userbase that proved difficult to moderate or restrain. Then they introduced the phone number requirement which did seem to reduce abuse. But of course YikYak died not so long after.

Granted, Twitter is in a very different position than YikYak. Curbing user growth in order to afford a better experience for the existing users is likely a good tradeoff.

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

#249

Post by crumpets »

phs318u wrote: post #201
apo wrote: post #86

Linking pseudonyms from two different networks (in this case, Twitter and the phone system) together is a classic and serious privacy leak. It's far from clear exactly what information Twitter, in its longtime effort to combat spam, has already collected on its users. Throwing a phone number into the mix expands to range of activities that can be unambiguously tied to the same individual. Given that Twitter certainly…

At the risk of going off topic (and without responding to the issue of Twitter requiring real phone numbers), I want to make a point regarding your last sentence. If a post is somehow sufficient to (potentially) warrant a prison sentence (eg for leaking state secrets or inciting terrorist acts), then I would suggest the amount of time that has passed is irrelevant (within jurisdictional bounds). If a crime has been c…

I think you forget that not every government is so nice. A comment against a young politician today could be a comment against the sitting dictator in 10 years that won’t care so much about the statute of limitations.
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