Twitter last week announced plans to begin tracking troublesome users via their mobile phone number. Along those lines, it has begunforcing users of anonymous web browser Torto providea number in order to open a new account.

Update:A Twitter representative told TechCrunch that the companyhas notmade specific changes to the registration process for Tor browser users.

Twitter does not block or force Tor users to phone verify in order to sign up. Occasionally, signups and logins may be asked to phone verify as they may exhibit behavior similar to spam. This is applicable to all IPs and not just Tor IPs.

However, we repeated the sign-up process more than a dozen time and each time a phone number was required, while many on Twitter also found the same. The exception, it seems, is for browsers like Mozilla which can runTor. In the latter case, Twitter does not appear to be requiring phone verification. At the least, it seems that more connections via Tor are being flagged as potentially spam accounts and thus require phone verification.

The U.S. company doesnt mandateits users to associate their account with a mobile number thats optional but its new security system will use short-term suspensions to get the digits of serial trolls. The idea here is to find something identifiable that can be used to trace them if they open new accounts, as many serial abuses do.

Those who open a new account via Tor, however, will have their number added to Twitters database right away, following this apparent new change in the sign-up process.

The issue was first flagged on Twitter, and we confirmed itwith our own testing.

I was able to open a new Twitter account using Googles Chrome browser by just providing an email address. The same process done withinTor leftme needing to submit a phone number for SMS verification.

We contacted Twitter for comment, but the company had not responded at the time of writing.

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Tor Users Must Now Provide A Phone Number To Open A New Twitter Account