[arciini]

While I'd love to attribute this to data harvesting and don't love Meta as a company, as someone who has tried to scrape Instagram in the past (to get recent images users have posted for specific restaurants), I believe this is a reasonable measure to increase the cost of new spam accounts.

The cost of an email is virtually 0. The cost of a unique phone number that can receive text-messages is non-zero. This was a pain in the butt for me, as you often have to get a real phone number (they reject VoIP ones) and that takes more work to get working.

Bots and scraping is a huge issue for Instagram. Instagram really dislikes the fact that you can buy a lot of likes for very cheap, so I kinda understand why they do this.

[lapcat]

> I believe this is a reasonable measure to increase the cost of new spam accounts.

You seem to be overlooking the bald-faced lie told by Meta/IG that someone's new account is violating "Community Guidelines" before they can even use it.

Moreover, it makes no sense that a phone number would be a "get out of jail free" card for violating Community Guidelines.

[saetaes]

> You seem to be overlooking the bald-faced lie told by Meta/IG that someone's new account is violating "Community Guidelines" before they can even use it.

I don't know about OP, but the the article they linked had a screenshot showing that the Community Guidelines they'd violated were around "account integrity". Looking at those[1], it seems plausible that OP and the article's author used something during account creation that triggered an integrity system, similar to what the parent was describing. Maybe they used a proxy/VPN, or something else that caused the robots to think that they were "Creat(ing) an account by scripted or other inauthentic means."

I don't think that big tech deserves a free pass on much, but to think they they're suspending accounts just to harvest phone numbers seems like it would be something they'd likely get into deep shit over: stock price drop, huge fines, CEO in front of Congress-type of thing. I doubt it would be worth it to them.

1. https://transparency.fb.com/policies/community-standards/acc...

[lapcat]

> the article they linked had a screenshot showing that the Community Guidelines they'd violated were around "account integrity". Looking at those[1], it seems plausible that OP and the article's author used something during account creation that triggered an integrity system, similar to what the parent was describing. Maybe they used a proxy/VPN, or something else that caused the robots to think that they were "Creat(ing) an account by scripted or other inauthentic means."

Compare my HN username to the domain name of the linked article. I am the author.

I did not use a proxy or VPN.

> to think they they're suspending accounts just to harvest phone numbers seems like it would be something they'd likely get into deep shit over: stock price drop, huge fines, CEO in front of Congress-type of thing. I doubt it would be worth it to them.

Apparently it was worth it to them:

https://techcrunch.com/2019/10/08/twitter-admits-it-used-two...

This is not a conspiracy theory, it's something that has actually happened.

[gurchik]

For what it's worth, I got the same "account integrity" explanation. Until proven otherwise I'm assuming that's the same canned response they always give. I did not use a proxy or a VPN, and I did not use an anonymous email address like a protonmail account or something similar.