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Comment by gentleman11 | Hacker News Reader

I made a twitter account once. I followed maybe 4 people basically as a way to subscribe to whatever they were saying, then liked a few posts.

I got banned the same day and told that I had violated their tos in an undefined way and that attempts to contact support would be ignored. My only tweet was to say that I had finally made a dumb twitter account.

Maybe the assumption was that every human on earth must already have a twitter account, so any new account must be a bot?

These platforms are just ridiculous and we shouldn’t use them.

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I got banned before I even posted anything. I had the account, then the third time I logged in it locked me out because of unspecified suspicious behavior. It was baffling.

Later I tried again with a different account and they wanted a phone number. It was a huge turnoff.

People give Signal heat about wanting a number but they won't even bat an eye at the same behavior from Twitter.

Frustrating to say the least.

Signal used phone numbers as user ID's. That has recently been changed.

Has it already? How can I change my logins?

Although they implemented Secure Value Recovery, they have not enabled "non-phone number based identifiers", at least in the UI. https://signal.org/blog/secure-value-recovery/

Source for this? The only thing I could find is this[1], which still requires a phone number sign up. I also checked the signal blog and couldn't find anything either.

[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/signal-to-move-away-from-phone...

I ran into the exact same situation. Have been trying to get in contact with their support for weeks without getting any response at all. This is absolutely ridiculous! (Yet at the same time they get "hacked" by teenagers and I can't help but to feel karma has been served...)

edit: Should anybody from Twitter read this, please unblock @FrontAid_CMS. (I guess it's worth a try...)

Tex payer funded government organizations(like USGS) post information on private platforms like Twitter and Facebook. Their ability to ban users for arbitrary reasons is problematic.

You don't need a Twitter account to read those messages on Twitter.

It's also not the only channels by which that information is disseminated.

> You don't need a Twitter account to read those messages on Twitter.

Didn't the courts rule that the president can't block people on twitter? That seems to suggest "just read while logged out" isn't a valid excuse the courts will accept.

They ruled that elected politicians cannot block individuals from participating in the replies to their tweets because they deemed it was the equivalent of a public space. They didn't rule that Twitter couldn't themselves moderate who posts on the platform.

> they deemed it was the equivalent of a public space.

Then how Twitter is allowed to moderate who posts on "the equivalent of a public space"? By banning a user Twitter blocks the user from participating in such a public space.

Because the law restricts government officials from banning interactions from the public, not private companies doing that on their private property.

Sounds like a loophole if the government official uses a friendly private space. I think private space should lose such an ability to the extent where it is being "deputized" that way for the government official. Thus even banned accounts must be allowed to interact with Trump for example (as long as the accounts stays in the legal space of course).

> sounds like a loophole

That is not uncommon in the effects of the law overlapped with court rulings. If nobody has tried to challenge the loophole directly in court, then the law is mute on how it would interpret the situation faced with a contradiction.

You can't really search on Twitter while logged out. Browsing while logged out is nice, however, because the little annoyances remind me that the physical world is a better place to exist than there.

Were you using tor, brave, strong adblocking or a disposable email and refused to give your phone number? All these things will get you banned now when trying to open a new account.

uBlock Origin (with roughly default settings) has never tripped Reddit's new account security stuff for me. I could see how it would make financial sense for social networks to ban account creation from Tor and disposable emails given the high spam-to-legitimacy ratio, although it's understandably frustrating for people who want anonymity.

Reddit is fine but parent was talking about Twitter.

With twitter this is true since at least 4 years. Furthermore when reusing a dormant account after about 10 years you are flagged as a fraud.

Happened to me recently with Amazon after password reset. But not instantly, only after very carefully choosing and comparing about a dozen articles for about 500EUR during the night, then in the early morning finally putting it all into the basket and confirming the order. BAM! Two dozen popups about fradulent activity, account locked!

WTF?!

At least I managed to get called back on my landline instantly, from someone in Egypt. Very friendly. Account unlocked, but now I'm in CAPTCHA-hell. Unusable that way.

All very unsatisfactory. Gives one the feeling one is on someones shitlist.

Anyways, there are other options.

"Shrug..."

On a related note, Twitter constantly gives me an error that I'm being "rate-limited" when I'm simply trying to read a tweet. A single tweet. Even if it's the first time I've accessed Twitter all month. Very bizarre.

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