Twitter keeps saying they’ve “cracked down” on bots and yet the bots are still just as much of a problem as they’ve ever been. I’d been on twitter for over decade — back when you tweeted via SMS — and deleted my account in the run up to the US election because it was impossible to discern real content from the content designed to churn the outrage machine. Whoever uses the term “crack down” to describe Twitter’s periodic deletion of only the most egregious bot accounts deserves an auto-reply meme bot featuring Inigo Montoya.

How many phone numbers are there? How many phone numbers does twilio have access to? Seems like it would at least put a cap on the number of problematic accounts.

That becomes problematic, since often numbers are 'recycled' by the likes of Twilio, and the number has some history or previous use, probably used before to register social media accounts. The trick is to find a brand new fresh number that hasn't been used ;)