I'm not the CFO at Twitter or anything, but even I can see that spam and propaganda cost those guys a lot of money. The number of advertisers who stop paying Twitter because of spam will be orders of magnitude larger than the number of advertisers who stop using Twitter because of phone numbers.
Did you read the link to the EFF page I added to the post? Why should Twitter be considered any more trustworthy than Facebook when they ask me for something they don't need to know?
They can avoid being victimized by spam and propaganda some other way... preferably some other way that I couldn't trivially defeat by giving them the number of a throwaway SIM card or a public phone booth.
How else would you suggest they combat spam? How do you receive a verification SMS on a public phone booth?
Most actual humans have a phone number, and Twitter wants a semi-1:1 mapping between human and Twitter account. Spammers have hundreds. This seems like a reasonable way to greatly increase the cost of making accounts for spammers.
Disable the account temporarily when some (small) number of other users flags its posts as spam. If a user is discovered to be filing false spam reports, disable that account. Accounts without a history of posting legitimate tweets should be rate-limited in both their posting and reporting privileges.
Externalizing the costs of fighting spam and "propaganda" (whatever that is) by demanding irrelevant personal information from all users is not the answer... at least, it's not the answer to those particular questions. It's better to empower users to build the trust necessary to solve the problem themselves.
>Disable the account temporarily when some (small) number of other users flags its posts as spam...
I'm not sure you're really hearing us.
The advertisers don't want their ads connected to spam or propaganda posts AT ALL. If Twitter actually shows the post, and then has ads along side it, it's too late. I mean it's great that someone bothers to flag that post as spam, but the advertiser's Twitter firehose processor is going to detect that pairing. Under your proposed regime the advertiser would be constantly detecting violations by spam users who were not being punished by Twitter. Under Twitter's proposed regime, the advertiser would report the first violation and the user, and his/her posts, would be gone. On top of that, there would be far fewer occurrences of such matches in the firehose data in the first place because accounts would be more difficult to create. Now add to all that the fact that the spammer would have to get a new burner phone to create a new account. That cost, coupled with the fact that each account could only pull off limited spamming means less profit for the spammer.
Put another way, the ROI of each new account tends toward zero under Twitter's model. Under your model, the ROI is bounded only by chance. That chance being the chance that enough people bother to mark the post as spam. Here's the thing though, what if they don't? What if the first Twitter hears about the spam is from the advertiser? Being in that situation is what Twitter is trying to keep to a minimum. That is the nightmare scenario that they live in today. Today they are in that situation several hundred times per week. Those are uncomfortable calls. (Probably hundreds per day by now? I haven't checked in a while.) With their new system, over time, I could see that going to ten to a hundred a week. (Maybe even lower if you add automated firehose processing for advertisers on the backend.)
They say "The customer is always right." Well, for Twitter, the customer is the advertiser.
The advertisers don't want their ads connected to spam or propaganda posts AT ALL
Then they will need to get used to disappointment, just like the rest of us. What they're asking for -- and what Twitter is promising -- is not reasonably achievable without fundamentally changing the nature of the service.
Today they are in that situation several hundred times per week.
TWTR has a $25 billion market cap, which they achieved with their current terms of service. I'm sure I have a violin small enough to play for them around here somewhere, but my scanning electron microscope is in the shop.
When they tell you it's not about the money... it's about the money.
When they tell you they want your phone number for anything other than making more money... it's about the money.
Edit: -4, huh? Really? Have people forgotten what Facebook just did? https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/09/you-gave-facebook-your...