Twitter Will Crack Down on Serial Trolls by Tracking Their Phone Number

&gt; It’s not a perfect solution — the troll could abandon the banned account and open a new one without supplying a number<p>Yeah, that&#x27;s a <i>slight</i> flaw in this plan, isn&#x27;t it?...<p>I guess the only real benefit of this new system is that admins can be more trigger-happy on (temporarily) banning accounts.

Comments here seem very negative.<p>If they do some basic tracking of users between accounts, e.g. based on IP address, cookies or browser fingerprint, they could easily do some kind of probabalistic determination of whether or not a potential new account is a troll&#x27;s puppet or not, and if it is, ask for a phone number immediately.<p>Phone verification won&#x27;t stop 100% of puppeting, but what percentage of potential trolls are willing to go to the hassle&#x2F;expense of getting a throwaway phone number just to get a new twitter account? 10%? 1%?

Perfectly reasonable disagreements with certain segments of the twitterati are enough to cause them to &#x27;rally the troops&#x27; to flag accounts into oblivion. I can&#x27;t think of any mechanism to halt &#x27;trolling&#x27; that won&#x27;t be abused itself. Twitter is between a rock and a hard place here.

&gt; It’s not a perfect solution — the troll could abandon the banned account and open a new one without supplying a number<p>Surely such devious machinations is beyond the capability of mere trolls...

&gt; It’s not a perfect solution — the troll could abandon the banned account and open a new one without supplying a number<p>Uhmm, I guess they could just scrap this entire plan and ask &quot;Are you a troll?&quot; with a checkbox at the signup page.

This seems ripe for abuse. So I just need to flag someone&#x27;s account as abusive (and god knows there&#x27;s always a way to frame something as abusive) a few times and they can never register with that email and&#x2F;or phone number?<p>Didn&#x27;t we already have an article here about a woman who posted a somewhat tasteless joke which cost her her entire career? Would the people that piled on her be considered abusers or not? Would she be considered abusive or not? (In that case, I think the answer is both - her joke was abusive and she suffered abuse in return)<p>I do like that people at twitter are at least trying to think of something.

In countries like India (which is a police state), it is not possible to get a phone&#x2F;SIM&#x2F;internet connection without giving your government ID and photograph.<p>I am not sure how it can work for most countries where you don&#x27;t need to give any ID and disposable SIM cards are cheap.

While there&#x27;s a lot of reason to be dubious that this can scale to deal with all of Twitter&#x27;s troll problems, bear in mind that there are people who are literally using Twitter to make death threats (I don&#x27;t think it makes sense to call people who do that &quot;trolls&quot;, as they&#x27;re far worse, but I guess that&#x27;s a losing battle).<p>A system designed to catch &quot;I&#x27;m gonna rape and kill you&quot; can be a lot dumber and closer to automated than something designed to moderate all comments (I don&#x27;t think twitter should be moderating comments. I do think they should be trying to address threats).

Isn&#x27;t this the kind of thing that only works by obscuring the method you use? If you tell the trolls you&#x27;re going to use their number to track them then they&#x27;re obviously not going to use their number when they create a new account.

I&#x27;m skeptical that this will work. The system seems both easily evaded by trolls and easily abused by &quot;counter-trolls&quot; (for lack of a better term).

Why is the same man who&#x27;s behind Square so reluctant to make people (and companies!) pay for &quot;verified&quot; accounts like we do for domains?

Bah. Let trolls be trolls, being miserable enough that it drives you to try to make others as miserable as you is punition enough anyway.

I guess Twitter hasn&#x27;t ever heard of Google Voice. Or prepaid phone numbers. Or the concept of using a different IP address to register an account.<p>This isn&#x27;t even security theatre. This is like some seventh graders cosplaying security for their parents and calling it theatre.