I think that's very unlikely. There are over 100,000 new accounts created on Twitter every day so we would expect a large and frequent amount of bans if what you are saying were true. Furthermore most Twitter visitors don't have accounts so it would be pretty foolish to base their anomaly detection on a metric that most of their visitors fail.
It's actually well known that you'll get blocked by Twitter within the first 2 minutes of registering, whatever you'll do.
They probably use it as a way to enforce their "soft" requirement of a phone number. After verifying that you have a working phone number, you'll get unblocked.
Also, Twitter routinely renders their tweets unaccessible to non-logged-in users, due to rate limits on their api (which is used by their web frontend).
So, I'm not one bit surprised if anyone would describe Twitter as foolish: that's exactly how they act
I had Microsoft do this. They notified me that my account was being suspicious, so I needed to provide a phone number to use it. I had literally just made the account though, zero activity at all. It was just to force me to give a phone number to them for their data harvest
I ran into this with MS as well. However, they explicitly stated that it did not need to be my phone number. So since it was for a work thing, I ask to use my boss' number to get around the lockout. Seemed pretty pointless.
Welp, it's a good thing these companies don't have a large amount of control over a lot of people's lives. And luckily their business practices are transparent and we all agree they're fair.
Hey, I have some experience creating intentionally suspicious Twitter accounts.
There is no phone number requirement. They're just as happy with an email address.
If you provide neither of those, then your account functionality is restricted (with a big obvious banner showing at the top of every page), but you still don't get blocked.
Once I needed to create several accounts at once and then have all but one of them follow the last one. Those accounts got blocked, but it's hard to blame Twitter for that.
> There are over 100,000 new accounts created on Twitter every day so we would expect a large and frequent amount of bans if what you are saying were true.
That's in fact true. Every single one of my Twitter account that I've created in the last few years have got banned within a few minutes even before I've had a chance to post anything meaningful with the account.
