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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

#271

Post by kingaillas »

gotocake wrote: post #157
anigbrowl wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may dislike Twitter (I do) but it is a large thing that exists and appears to provide sufficient value to people that dismissing it as 'silliness' just sounds empty-headed and naive.

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 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 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.

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

#272

Post by Simple_Guy »

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…

to some, soccer and american football are just silliness. and yet these are multi-billion buckos industries.

It can be used to influence elections, to shape public opinion, to market products etc. Billions are at stake. It's real. It's not silliness.

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

#273

Post by CamperBob2 »

dymk wrote: post #222
CamperBob2 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you read the link to the EFF page I added to the post? Why should Twitter be considered any more trustworthy than Facebook when they ask me for something they don't need to know? They can avoid being victimized by spam and propaganda some other way... preferably some other way that I couldn't trivially defeat by giving them the number of a throwaway SIM card or a public phone booth.

How else would you suggest they combat spam? How do you receive a verification SMS on a public phone booth? Most actual humans have a phone number, and Twitter wants a semi-1:1 mapping between human and Twitter account. Spammers have hundreds. This seems like a reasonable way to greatly increase the cost of making accounts for spammers.

How else would you suggest they combat spam?

Disable the account temporarily when some (small) number of other users flags its posts as spam. If a user is discovered to be filing false spam reports, disable that account. Accounts without a history of posting legitimate tweets should be rate-limited in both their posting and reporting privileges.

Externalizing the costs of fighting spam and "propaganda" (whatever that is) by demanding irrelevant personal information from all users is not the answer... at least, it's not the answer to those particular questions. It's better to empower users to build the trust necessary to solve the problem themselves.

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

#274

Post by craftyguy »

thinkloop wrote: post #268
LeifCarrotson wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Your only choice as individual user is to leave the platform. That's not even enough anymore. You also have to make sure that every one of your contacts do not upload their address book to conveniently find friends like you who may or may not be on the network. And that they don't tag you in images, events, etc. You're an entry in the Facebook database, whether you have or have had an active profile or not.

I'm surprised that no nation or union (ie EU) has fought this. If people exchange phone numbers, are they also giving each other implicit rights to share them with anyone else? If not, shouldn't platforms that enable this en mass be reprimanded for it? It is currently impossible to remain anonymous, regardless of whether you participate in the system or not. In my case, given the density of my network on social media…

> I'm surprised that no nation or union (ie EU) has fought this.

Why would any politician fight this? It's a platform they all use to gain/sustain popularity, and it's the official national communication channel for the US.

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

#275

Post by zrm »

tzs wrote: post #236
baroffoos wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There isn't any good way to maintain perfect privacy while also rejecting bots/trolls with 20 accounts.

NOTE: in the following when I talk about "digital cash" systems I am not talking about blockchains! It might be possible to do something based on one of the centralized "digital cash" systems that cryptographers have developed. A typical system allows some central entity (e.g., a bank) to issue a "digital dollar". The digital dollar can be transferred to a merchant in such a way that the merchant can turn it back in…

You don't even need the token issuer to have government identities, you just need some way of rationing tokens.

Using identities for that is actually somewhat problematic because identity theft is generally pretty easy. The attacker compromises many devices, or a database containing the information of millions of people necessary to impersonate any of them to the token issuer. Then not only does the attacker get a large number of tokens, a large number of people also lose the ability to sign up for the service themselves. It also opens you up to deanonymization attacks if the token issuer and the site collude, or anyone else can compromise or coerce both of them at once.

But there are plenty of other alternatives.

You could ration them based on some other scarce thing, e.g. issue only X number of tokens per public IPv4 address or IPv6 /64 block per year.

You could exchange tokens for a security deposit. A few dollars for a token that can be used for over a decade is a minimal cost to a real user, but a few dollars for a token that lasts 90 seconds before getting banned is a real cost to the spammer.

And you can combine them. One free token per public IPv4 address per month, and if you need more then provide a security deposit.

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

#276

Post by dragonwriter »

joering2 wrote: post #259
josh_carterPDX wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. The first thing I thought was that someone will build a script that creates a Twitter account then simply uses Twilio's API to create a valid phone number to receive verifications. Good luck Twitter!

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.

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

#277

Post by ssalka »

thekyle wrote: post #263
CoryG89 wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an interesting idea. Doubles as a strategy for monetizing.

I suppose you could take the deposits and earn interest on them as a possible supplemental revenue stream.

Not trying to go there but this very clearly sounds like a staking system

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

#278

Post by awad »

CoryG89 wrote: post #253
sadris wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This is an interesting idea. Doubles as a strategy for monetizing.

From an accounting perspective in this hypothetical scenario I believe that you would not be legally allowed to dip into the deposit money save for that recovered through bans. Which creates very perverse incentives.

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

#279

Post by tootahe45 »

_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…

Keep in mind your account isn't really unblocked, you have a very high chance of being shadow banned if you post on a VPN or TOR.

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

#280

Post by awad »

samename wrote: post #257
14 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish there was a service out there that you could use your phone number and they will validate that you are real for companies and they would be separate from Twitter or any company using them so the user remains anonymous. I don't like some of the nasty stuff the net throws my way either but I do ultimately think if I had to choose a censored internet vs uncensored but full of negatives, I would chose the uncensor…

This almost sounds like something too good to be true. Big companies like Twitter and Facebook wouldn't want to use this service because they want to collect the data. This company would need to charge websites for the service, otherwise their only alternative is to sell their user's data or advertise, which leaves us right where we already are. Of course there may be other ways for such a service to survive, but tho…

I take the opposite view...something like this seems rather viable as a business that companies would gladly pay money for but it also basically sounds like another Equifax/Experian/Transunion fiasco waiting to happen. The only logical thing I can thing of is a consortium of the big telcos creating a shared database and service that companies could tap into.
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