My grandpa accidentally used a phone number to register when he was trying to log in. His original account got promptly locked and for months they would periodically lock it. He had to provide ID proof every time.

I don't use Facebook, but I totally recognize how valuable it is for my grandpa. Sadly, Facebook does not allow any mistakes to be made on its site, which is what older people tend to do when faced with new tech.

FWIW it's quite simple to make fake IDs that pass FB verification. Not that I support making FB accounts, even fraudulent ones. I'd like to see a class action privacy suit, because in conjunction with their real names policy, FB is forcing identity disclosure simply to use hardware.

I just tried and failed: https://twitter.com/shazow/status/1295835462360338436

I used a realistic sounding name, I tried several email addresses that were rejected as blocked, eventually I landed on an email that worked and my account got immediately disabled.

I'm sure I could eventually succeed, but I don't believe that it's fair to brush this off as something that anybody could do easily.

Your tweet indicates that you were stopped by the "government ID required" hoop. I've been there. I'm no graphics design wizard, but I foiled this by (1) taking a photograph of my actual government ID, (2) copying letters around to spell the name I'm known by, (3) applying some noise and blur filters (4) downsampling, and (5) redacting all PII except name & face. Compared to making an actual fake ID, I call this quite simple.

I imagine that you could use a plausible but fake name and a plausible but fake "random person" image, but I'm not interested in actually interacting with that website enough to try.

You might try a clean OS & browser install, to avoid trackers, and maybe if you've been banned a bunch already, use a VPN (or stop using a VPN) or use Starbucks wifi or something.

That is, admittedly, a lot of work, even if it does bypass this absurd requirement.

I don't recommend or use that shit website anymore, so the simple solution is stop doing the thing that's hurting you... but if you really need it for some reason then putting ~30min into making a fake id might be worthwhile.