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It's understandable they might require a phone number to keep down spam. It's less understandable they'd lie to new users on the reasons their account was bloc
by deogeo 8y ago
It's understandable they might require a phone number to keep down spam.
It's less understandable they'd lie to new users on the reasons their account was blocked. We can't expect even the smallest scraps of honesty from corporations anymore.
- jrockway 8y agoIt is understandable why they'd lie. If the error message was something like, "your request was blocked because you've included HTTP headers in the order [x-foo, x-bar], which is the header ordering in 99.9% of spam tweets", they would just change their agent's header order instead of no longer spending spam. I am not sure people realize what a high percentage of users of "free" services are spam bots of some sort. Sit around in the average Twitch channel and you'll see a flood of spam from similarly-named accounts every so often. They get around the filters because Twitch tells you why you're filtered. "This room is in followers only mode", so they follow the stream they want to spam a few days/weeks in advance. "This word is not allowed by the spam filters", so they change one letter and continue spamming that word. Etc., etc. It sucks for normal users caught up in spam filters, but it's an enormous problem that there is no easy solution to.
- deogeo 8y agoYou misunderstand - not divulging what triggered the suspicion isn't lying. Claiming a phone number is required due to suspicious activity, when in fact it is required of almost all new accounts, is.
- vkou 8y agoI'd find anyone creating a Twitter account in 2019 to be somewhat suspect.
- hombre_fatal 8y agoNew people are born every day.
- est31 8y agoAnother covert spam fighting way is when one of the platforms require you to set up a phone number "for two factor authentication", basically not letting you to use their service unless you actually provide the number. There are multiple platforms framing the issue in this way. Facebook once required that you set up 2 factor authentication and they promised that the phone number won't be used for anything else. Few years later, they started spamming users at those phone numbers with notifications about what their friends did. And since this year, those numbers can be used to search for users on the platform. The big issue with giving those platforms your data is that you hand over control. Even if they promise you something.
- katbyte 8y ago> And since this year, those numbers can be used to search for users on the platform. And someone really should go after them for it. Last month an abuser from a decade ago found me on facebook and messaged me out of nowhere. Upside is i was able to tell him off, but I know many other people would have a far more.. trying encounters.
- nl 8y agoCreating an account from a system which no Twitter tracking pixel has ever seen may well be suspicious, where suspicious means statistically correlated with accounts create to spam or acts as hostile bots. I don't think this is lying at all.
- onlyrealcuzzo 8y agoI've wanted this as a service forever. Does anyone do it?
- deogeo 8y agoI believe Google's captcha does. With the unfortunate side-effect of Google de-anonymizing everyone they let through - as you'll know if you try to access something behind captcha through Tor, and get stuck in an infinite loop helping Google train their artificial vision. They claim it's against bots, but no matter how well you identify traffic lights and fire hydrants, it won't let you through.
- onlyrealcuzzo 8y agoGoogle's works with JS, though, right? It's not a service where you feed it a request and it responds how likely that request is to be spam, right? I know JS is probably better for this, since you can do all sorts of things like measure how the user types and scrolls and whatnot.