Tor Users Must Now Provide A Phone Number To Open A New Twitter Account
Context & Ripple Effects
The Tor requirement lands weeks into Twitter's push to make phone numbers the spine of account identity: it had just launched Digits, its phone-number-based web login system, and days earlier added a 'report dox' option while making some users verify contact info (the doxxing-report rollout).
Requiring a phone number specifically from Tor users extends the same playbook that culminated in the broader policy three years later, when new accounts generally needed confirmed email or phone — here aimed at the hardest-to-verify cohort, anonymous connections routed through Tor.
First-order effects
- Tor users opening new Twitter accounts must surrender a phone number, ending fully anonymous signup through the network and raising the bar for whistleblowers and censored-region users who relied on Tor.
Second-order effects
- Phone numbers become de facto identity infrastructure across Twitter's stack — login via Digits, spam enforcement, and eventually the profile label for phone-verified users (the verified-phone badge test) — so any change to phone policy propagates through all of them.
Third-order effects
- The pattern cuts both ways over time: by 2019 Twitter let users enroll in 2FA without a phone number at all, decoupling security from the identifier it was building in 2015 — evidence that phone-mandatory identity creates lock-in platforms later have to unwind.
The trend: Platforms are progressively binding accounts to phone-verifiable identities as their core anti-spam and anti-abuse mechanism, with anonymous networks like Tor bearing the cost first.