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Comment by schlowmo | Hacker News Reader

> "And finally, keep in mind that after all this, Twitter can always kick you off for their own reasons."

The problem with

anonymous e-mail address + burner phone + always use TOR to access the account

is that this doesn't play out well in the medium term. This triggers various automatic "anti-abuse" measures on Twitters side. Those measures include: random prompt for re-verification of the phone number, which fails with the burner phone number used to create the account.

It's hard (if not impossible) to maintain such an account in the long run while protecting ones identity.

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It is indeed hard to maintain Twitter accounts via Tor. Establishing accounts via Tor, using burner phones for verification, isn't hard. And there's no problem reading feeds via Tor. But tweeting via Tor, in my experience, is indeed a crap shoot. So is tweeting via commercial VPN services.

What seems to work is tweeting via private VPNs, running on anonymously-leased VPS. To route that VPN through Tor, you just run the VPN server (in TCP mode) on the VPS as an onion service.

But there's still the risk of cellphone re-verification. So for long-term accounts, you need a persistent number. One solution is to have trusted friends in other jurisdictions, who can activate the number for you when needed.

> One solution is to have trusted friends in other jurisdictions, who can activate the number for you when needed.

If you have a trusted friend in an independent jurisdiction, the whole complicated dance with burner phones and so on becomes unnecessary. Just have the trusted friend create the account for you and hand you the password.

Sure, that's doable too. But then you have a major IP address change, which could raise flags.

There are "Burner" apps out there that give you a different phone number.

I'm unsure if it'd be easier to maintain. But off the top of my head I'd think it'd be easier to spoof.

Almost all numbers from free "burner apps"[0] I came across are already burned for all major Social Networks (probably because someone else already used those numbers for registration).

I don't know if it works with paid services, but then you have the problem of paying for it anonymously.

[0] I guess you mean those services which offers some mobile numbers for receiving SMS to anyone without registering.

Virtual phone numbers are flagged as such and all of the major providers will refuse to use them for verification purposes. Social media companies already thought of this.

Or you could keep creating new accounts with new phones, tweeting the next account as the last tweet of the previous one. You won't get an easy to digest single thread of tweets, but you can maintain a chain of trust, insofar as the accounts are trusted to begin with.

One of my Twitter accounts is a Friends Only twitter account that has only been used via twitter + bitlbee connected to the internet via a tor proxy, plus IRC client

https://wiki.bitlbee.org/HowtoTwitter

https://github.com/nillab/dotfiles/blob/master/bitlbee.conf#...

https://irssi.org/

It's always worked, I've never been prompted for verification. I'm not sure how twitter would prompt me for verification!

you don't need to burn the burner phone necessarily. Just take out the battery and store it somewhere safe.

> "which fails with the burner phone number used to create the account."

Maybe I expressed that a bit unclear: I didn't mean it fails because you have no longer access to the number (= you burned the burner). It fails because Twitter don't accept this same number which worked while sign-up anymore for re-verfification.

To be honest: I'm not sure if Twitter accepts any other number in that case or if the prompt for phone number re-verification is just an obscure way of saying "Your account is permanently locked for any reason."

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