I've got an account from 2009 and have never had to enter my phone number (if I ever get asked, that'll be the time when I stop using it).

Nowadays if you create a new account it’ll get briefly banned while they do additional checks to ensure you’re human, which is fixed by giving a phone number. Id almost appreciate just asking for one on signup then the charade

That's not always the case. Sometimes it asked me for a phone number, but most of the time not when not using a VPN or something similar. But last year I managed to create two Twitter accounts with the Tor browser and some sketchy email address and never got asked for a number, just had to do some captcha after a few minutes.

I created a few twitter accounts this year for various reasons and all of them had the same number requirement after around 24 hours!

The various Meta properties do this too, except instead of phone numbers they require government ID and headshots. It’s all a scummy dark pattern relying on the sunk cost fallacy.

I've used Twitter from 2013 to 2021, and have eventually been locked-out by Twitter requesting a phone number with no way to work around.

It'll be a shame if that happens to my account, as I lurk on Twitter every day (but never tweet or like), but I value privacy of my phone number more than I value the enjoyment I get from it.

That's when I ended up using nitter. Before stopping altogether when Elmo broke it.

Doesn't Twitter force you to add a phone number now?

As far as I remember they only use it for spam protection (i.e. the phone number serves as a moderate-level "proof of humanity"), but not for 2FA purposes (unless you pay for their premium service).

Yes and they plan to require ID verification next, losing privacy-conscious users is clearly not a big issue for Musk.