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Comment by mirimir | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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.

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.

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