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Comment by kibwen | Hacker News Reader

There's not a single social network that has begun to require phone verification because of the risk of "toxicity or hate speech". It's all to fight spam and to better track user activity (and, if we're being charitable to them, perhaps to stymie deliberate propaganda/fake news).

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This.

A service I built+run started getting overrun with bot users. The signup CAPTCHA didn’t help because they’d sign-up for accounts using humans - then after that’s done they’d copy their access tokens to the bot users. We couldn’t use a CAPTCHA for every operation on the platform.

But by requiring a real phone number that we verify (by placing a TTS phone call - not an SMS - as processing received TTS calls is much harder for the bot makers to automate) - but also looking-up the phone number’s SS7 info to prevent people from using Skype, Google Voice, and Twilio users - all commonly used by bot operators.

(Legitimate users that want an account but can’t make it past our bot screen can still contact us directly to be set-up - and to-date no-one has done this or complained about the (admittantly user-hostile) verification process.

I don't know what your service is but I simply wouldn't be able to use it as my only phone number is Google Voice.

It's highly likely that prospective users just leave when encountering your restrictions and having their phone numbers rejected.

It’s a B2B service (“B2SB”?) - not targeting people/consumers - so it’s reasonable to assume they have a real phone number.

Which mobile carriers do you support, if not Google Fi (which is mine)? Or only landlines (which barely exist at my day job)?

My last position was for a b2b voip telephony replacement type of deal. It would be trivial to load up on real geographic numbers from anywhere in the world and automate it all for bots.

> it’s reasonable to assume they have a real phone number

Just an anecdote, but I rarely give out my non-Google Voice number on sign-up forms. I don’t want my mobile in a database to be spammed.

If a phone number is required on sign-up, and my Google Voice doesn’t work, I usually pass. Whether for personal or commercial use.

It's not reasonable. Voice is the only phone number I use and I use B2B services. If you prevented me from signing up I'd go to a competitor.

I run a business. Why is it reasonable to assume the use of legacy phone numbers?

We target a particular subset of retail-customer businesses which all generally have a phone-number.

I despise services that require to have a real phone number. Being locked out of something when you travel, have no reception, lost your phone or got it stollen is just a pain. Bonus hate points for banks that implement a sms code check for online payments with your visa/mastercard (common in France at least). I changed bank for one that provided me with a device generating one time codes from my CB

It’s only used for sign-up/registration in my case.

Goddamn Paypal MFA

> but also looking-up the phone number’s SS7 info

Does that really work? I'd like a service like that for my personal phone.

Truecaller is the easiest way to access this data for consumers. https://www.truecaller.com/. The two commercial data providers for this are Telesign and Neustar.

Also https://www.opencnam.com/

> There's not a single social network that has begun to require phone verification because of the risk of "toxicity or hate speech". It's all to fight spam and to better track user activity (and, if we're being charitable to them

I think that _is_ being very charitable. Way too much in fact.

The thing with Chinese censorship is that people living under it either don't care about it or are fully aware of it. It's very much in the open.

On the other hand, Facebook/Instagram, Microsoft, Google, etc all start requiring your phone number for verification or some other valid reason, reeling and locking you in, and before you know it not only one entity but any entity willing to pay for your data has access to it.

We should of course be outraged at both approaches.

Also, is removing fake news/propaganda not censorship solely because it's not the government doing it? Because if that's the case, Facebook and Google only really started removing fake news _because_ governments started to apply pressure on them.

Well: newspapers use Facebook for comments and used toxicity and hate speech as explanation for why they went away from their old systems.

> It's all to fight spam and to better track user activity (and, if we're being charitable to them, perhaps to stymie deliberate propaganda/fake news).

Who is that being charitable to? The Chinese government also censors to stymie deliberate propaganda; it's just that in their case we typical HN posters happen to be on the side the propaganda that is being censored is for, whereas in our case we are on an opposing one.

I'm not convinced by the usual counterargument that "China blocks true information whereas we block fake news". There doesn't to seem to be anything qualitatively different between a cartoon of Liu Xiaobo ascending to heaven from a Chinese prison and most of the examples on https://www.cbsnews.com/media/russian-ads-on-facebook-a-gall... (which I assume is meant to be a sample of deliberate propaganda that we want FB to block); both tend to contain some kernel of factual statements that are probably not contentious (you can probably get official documentation that Liu was jailed and died in China, too), but the point is not in this content but in an exhortation that the reader should feel about them in a particular way and translate this feeling into support for a particular political movement.

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