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Comment by katsume3 | Hacker News Reader

At least with Facebook it's harder to do disinformation campaigns as they require a phone number to register, which would mean some outfit like the Russian IRA[0] would need a fuck-tonne of Russian-number phones to do influence operations, which would be a huge red flag and a sure-fire way of doing attribution to Russian state backed entities.

Twitter, not so much. I can still register an account with just an email address (and emails are easy to cook up en masse, unlike phone numbers), then I do my psyop campaign.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Research_Agency

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Are we really going to assume that nation-state entities can't send agents to buy burner phones in other countries or just downright spoof the phone numbers entirely?

I can go buy thousands of American phone numbers on Twilio right now, the only thing stopping me is my wallet.

US phone verified facebook accounts cost less than $1 each.

There's no need to use twilio, the ecrime marketplace has this covered.

Oh yeah because Twilio like to be partially responsible for election rigging. Being a dev at Twilio must be an interesting job: you get to witness the erosion of democracy!

Twilio are going to do due diligence on where those numbers are being used ? How can you expect them to do that ?

This is a ridiculous argument. Do you also blame Boeing for 9/11?

agreed.

and the idea that the "attribution" is a driving concern also ignores the fact that, well, nobody cares. there is universal agreement of Russia's involvement in 2016 and there was virtually no cost to be paid.

> there is universal agreement of Russia's involvement in 2016

I don't think there is. There's a lot of agreement that Russia (and others) tried to influence the 2016 election, but there's no agreement at all wrt how much influence they had. The same is true for Cambridge Analytica: widespread agreement that they did stuff, not quite as much agreement on how effective it was.

Twitter lets you register with just an email address, but will require a phone number to continue to use the account almost immediately upon actually using it.

US phone numbers are easily available for under $1/month from various services, and you don't need the number for a whole month. They're cheaper if you're willing to do some more legwork.

Requiring a phone number reduces casual abuse, and increases costs for abusers, but is only really effective if the abuser's gains are in the same neighborhood as the costs, in which case they'll move to somewhere they can gain more or spend less.

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