The discovery
I wanted to create a twitter account many months ago and did it just fine. I wanted to follow people I find interesting and perhaps also send my creations out to the ether for everyone to see. So I made an account and followed some people like Elon Musk, NASA etc.
After just a few minutes, the page displayed in the ingress of this blog post were displayed. I was blocked because of “unusual behavior”. They required not only a pass of Google Captcha, but also required my phone number.
I didn’t understand why they would need my phone number to assess that I am indeed a human being. So I kindly declined the offer, logged out and never logged in to that account again.
The move
This was nagging in my head while listening to the Joe Rogan podcasts with the Twitter CEO and Tim Pool. I am not a fan of their actions recently and I cannot even get onto their platform to begin tweeting since I don’t want to give them my phone number.
That’s when it hit me, I had just recently moved to a new location and had a new ISP. I had a completely different IP address and just to be sure I installed Ubuntu 18.10 onto my computer and very well, yes my account got pretty much instantly locked just as the last time.
I had a new IP
I had a newly installed operating system and browser.
There is no way my registration process is anything unusual. I didn’t tweet a single tweet. I just waited a couple of minutes and then reloaded the page. Locked. No addons, no nothing. What exactly about my behavior is unusual? That I registered on your platform?
I then tried to logon to my old account that got locked month prior to this event only to be stuck in a random “consent” loop. Each time I reload the page I get the same consent error page and I cannot even log out from this experience. it has been like this for a while now.
What the actual fuck twitter?