Twitter to require email or phone number confirmation for new accounts, use AI to take action on spammy accounts, add warning on accounts behaving suspiciously
- Platform will require new accounts to confirm email or phone — Twitter will place warning sign on suspicious accounts
Context & Ripple Effects
Twitter has been tightening identity friction at the edges for years — it made some users verify contact info alongside a doxxing-report option in early 2015, then required Tor users to hand over a phone number just to open an account weeks later. The new blanket email-or-phone confirmation extends that piecemeal gating to every new signup.
The AI enforcement and suspicious-account warnings also build on announced-but-unshipped machinery: a planned safety mode that auto-blocks accounts acting abusive or spammy and profile labels designating bots under the January verification policy. This is those threads converging into a single anti-spam stack.
First-order effects
- Every new Twitter account now needs a confirmed email or phone before operating normally, raising the cost of bulk account creation that spam networks depend on.
Second-order effects
- Competitors face pressure to match the trust signals: LinkedIn had already moved toward work-email and phone verification with suspicious-message alerts, and Twitter itself later tested profile labels showing whether a user verified their phone, turning verification status into visible profile real estate.
Third-order effects
- If AI-driven action on 'spammy' behavior becomes standard, platforms shift from reactive moderation to pre-emptive identity gating — trading anonymity and Tor-style access (the 2015 precedent) for automated trust scoring across the whole account lifecycle.
The trend: Social platforms are converging on mandatory identity confirmation plus algorithmic behavioral enforcement as the default defense against spam and abuse.