[_jomo]

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 a couple days at least. I assume this is on purpose to make it cumbersome for spammers.

They always reply with the same boilerplate, but the account will be unlocked:

  Your account is now unlocked, and we’re sorry for the inconvenience.
   
  Twitter has automated systems that find and remove automated spam accounts and it looks like your account got caught up in one of these spam groups by mistake. This sometimes happens when an account exhibits automated behavior in violation of the Twitter Rules (https://twitter.com/rules).

  Again, we apologize for the inconvenience. Please do not respond to this email as replies will not be monitored.

[numbsafari]

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.

[munk-a]

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.

Again, twitter is just silliness, but the banking example is a lot more serious of a case where the pros and cons need to be very carefully weighed.

[distant_hat]

Eh. It is the primary communication mode for the current US president.

[digitalengineer]

Again, twitter is just silliness...

[TheHypnotist]

And a significant source for misinformation campaigns.

[erikpukinskis]

> twitter is just sillines

Would you say the same about your phone number? If not, why? If I run my business on Twitter (or YouTube, or Facebook) is it that different from a bank?

[munk-a]

No?

I'm not clear on what the real point of this question is - twitter is a terrible platform to use for actual communication. Their sorting by "relevance" can cause recent messages to get lost in the shuffle and randomly mess with your visibility. It may be you're considering twitter as a business in which to coordinate product sales, but I'll assume it's for customer relations management, many companies that have a twitter account for CS stuff also offer email, messanger (of some sort) and phone if you have an issue you need to resolve due to the fact that platform just isn't well suited for business - the network effect of it is surprisingly low (a _lot_ of people aren't on or don't regularly use twitter), it is semi-public which may violate your business concerns and... you're handing the keys to your reputation to the third party that has acted poorly in the past.

If you check out youtubers talking about youtubers (I have no specific example on hand) they tend to complain endlessly about how the trending algorithms can drive thousands of potential viewers toward or away from their channel for no particular reason - there the network effect is strong enough that they don't have an option though, if your business is streaming a show then YouTube offers a much richer starting viewer base.

I guess my assumption is, if your business doesn't force you to use a particular social media platform exclusively then... use some other communication method per preference?

I'm really just confused by the question though - these things are not the same and twitter is simply not as important as the place your money lives (and I think pretty much everyone would agree? Maybe I'm getting too old)

[anigbrowl]

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.

[gotocake]

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 phone number.

Twitter seems to be a rage factory and amplifier, a shitty blogging format, and very occasionally a way to twist the arm of recalcitrant customer service.

[coldtea]

Lots of things (a) exist, and (b) appear to provide sufficient value to people, and yet are either totally superficial or deleterious.

(a) and (b) are some of the lowest of bars. Even ISIS passes those, along with tons of other things (deep fried Mars bars, for one).

The parent made a qualitative argument and/or value judgement. Mere existence doesn't negate it, arguments why his values are bad, or shouldn't be taken into account, might.

[libraryatnight]

Lots of things people value are suppliers of silliness. Humans put a lot of stock into silliness.

[nl]

I'm really just confused by the question though - these things are not the same and twitter is simply not as important as the place your money lives (and I think pretty much everyone would agree?..

I disagree pretty strongly.

Twitter is much more important than the bank I keep my money in.

Banking in fungible. Twitter gives me access.

I've arranged meetings with the partners of the biggest VC fund in Australia sorely via Twitter. I've had in depth discussions of the details of ML models with their authors via Twitter.

Generally speaking I'm much more relaxed about a 2 day delay in my banking than a 2 day delay in Twitter.

Maybe I'm getting too old

I'm 43, so I doubt it's that.

[duckqlz]

"Twitter is much more important than then bank I keep my money in" Wow, I will gladly trade you my twitter handle for your credit card number ;D

"Banking in fungible." You cannot instantly replace a bank account, transfer credit, or make changes without the help of the bank itself yet twitter can instantly be replaced by many forms of communication (SMS, Email, IRC, Talking, etc).

"I'm much more relaxed about a 2 day delay in my banking than a 2 day delay in Twitter." So if your car is on empty and you stop to buy gas only to find that your checking and credit accounts (from the bank) have a 2 day delay, you would find that acceptable!?

[ams6110]

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.

[TheGrumpyBrit]

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.

[nyuszika7h]

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.

[coldtea]

>Would you say the same about your phone number?

No.

>If not, why?

Because a phone is a universal method of communication, for businesses, spouses, families, friends, and everything in between.

Twitter is yet another social media gossip discussion site, just one with a gimmick (limited characters).

>If I run my business on Twitter (or YouTube, or Facebook) is it that different from a bank?

The only businesses run on Twitter are ads, influencers, and PR -- and those deserve to die anyway.

[nothal]

FWIW, there are far more businesses on social media than that. There’s an entire culture of chefs, makeup artists, and the like that advertises solely on twitter/instagram/etc. Social media is actually a really effective tool to reach your target audience in these cases.

[zrobotics]

>> chefs, makeup artists, and the like

Isn't that covered under "influencers"? What tangible benefit does Twitter provide to a working makeup artist (ie someone doing makeup for films/tv/photography/etc)? Sure, there are makeup artists that run businesses on Twitter, but their business is selling branded makeup and promoting sponsored products. That type of business is 100% reliant in social media, but aside from influencers are there any working professionals that would be unemployed without Twitter or Instagram?

[libraryatnight]

No, why would he? They're completely different. Twitter is nothing at all like a phone number.

[erikpukinskis]

It's similar in that you may have set up your business in such a way that you rely on your phone number for clients to contact you, and you may have set up your business in such a way that you rely on your Twitter for clients to contact you.

[ams6110]

Very common in banking is a situation where you deposit a check, but the bank puts a 2- to 5-business-day hold on availability of the funds until the check clears. They might do this if it's not a local bank, or if for whatever reason they have a doubt about the check clearing.

[numbsafari]

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.

[cooper12]

> twitter is just silliness

It was one of the premier sources for propaganda during a certain country's recent election. It has been used to coordinate protests. It's been used to break national news. You can get minute-by-minute updates of events from it. Let's not pretend that one of the world's most-used communication platforms doesn't play a huge role in modern discourse.

[munk-a]

Actually this^ I'm not certain why it was downvoted but I had forgotten to take the Arab Spring into account and Egyptians organizing on twitter around the internet ban. Both have had... outcomes. But they were clearly necessary actions and twitter did help fuel that occurrence.

To contrast though, if a service being a premier source of propaganda (avoiding the question of this specific case since... politics) and offers no other value, then it's actually worse than trivial it's harmful.

So, it's a mixed bag. I still wish there was a better engineered platform than twitter out there though.

[Simple_Guy]

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.

[marcosdumay]

Yeah, I have abandoned a bank due to bad rules on its strategic delays on transactions. Every time I had a problem I could solve it with a quick call, even outside of working hours, but it was a bother.

It's not an inherently bad thing to do, but it's easy to overdo, and on a company that depends on network effects it can be very dangerous.

[cm2187]

The same is an efficient email anti-spam technique (greylisting). Except that you get all your emails delayed by 20min-5h, which will not make any user happy.

[goranb]

I tried to open a new account on Twitter app for Android, using only my email. It was going ok until it asked me to provide my phone after confirming my email. The reason: suspicious activity / spam behavior. The account is in limbo now, and I can't access it any more.

Time to spin up a Mastodon instance.

[RandomTisk]

The same thing happened to me two years ago, though I had signed up with a PC with Gmail and my account was locked pending phone verification within an hour.

[plinkplonk]

fwiw, if you challenge this, twitter will restore your account.

[justaj]

This didn't work in my case.

I signed up using a Tutanota e-mail. Every time I got a verification code and then entered it into twitter I got an "Oops, something went wrong." message. After spending many hours in vain trying to find Twitter's e-mail support, I gave up and initiated a "Trouble logging into my account" help procedure. However, that ultimately failed since surprise! Twitter couldn't find any history under that account name.

[nyuszika7h]

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

[tootahe45]

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.

[neop1x]

People... please... move to Mastodon https://mastodon.social/. There is no point in using commercial centralized service for things like sharing short message.

I hate Twitter because: - slow javascript - ads - won't show full thread without loging in - now requiring phone - censorship

[octosphere]

> They have been doing this for any account registered from a VPN

I made my own VPN with Algo[0] and host it on Digital Ocean. The IP is a Digital Ocean IP and therefore really hard to blacklist as a VPN. There is no way to tell if I am using a VPN and I regularly setup new accounts on Twitter (mostly shitpost accounts used for venting at products/companies that have wronged me), or novelty accounts that have a particular theme to them, etc

[0] https://github.com/trailofbits/algo

[Vinnl]

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.

[nyuszika7h]

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.

[LifeLiverTransp]

Simply, easily, trivial. With just a little effort. Try again often, try again later. No problem, to appeal, the process, Mr.Kafka, all you have to do is, be seen by two witnesses, to uphold your interest in.. Of course, if that is to complicated, and the nuances of the wording, are a endless stream of passive agressive insults to your intelect. Noone can help you, because there is noone home. The company you are trying to reach, consists of a algorithmic amobea, and would like to connect you with other concerned customers, so that you can all support each other in these difficult times, created by this difficult company.

Just give them a fake telephone number: https://receive-smss.com/

[RankingMember]

Those temp SMS numbers used to work, but now the places that require a phone number seem to be sharing notes and block them (they'll accept it, but never send a text). This is similar to how places that require an email address have gotten pretty good at blocking many of the temporary email providers (they'll accept them and just never send you an email).