Hack the Planet.But it's a lot harder to get an anonymous phone number. You need to buy a burner phone and SIM for cash, wait two weeks for the CCTV system in the store to overwrite the video of the transaction, then activate your phone far from home. Once you've used it to get a Twitter account-creation authentication SMS (again, nowhere near your home or office, and nowhere where there's a record of you having traveled to), you need to destroy both the phone and the SIM. That's just to set up the account!
Previously, previously, previously.
The original article, if you want to skip the BoingBoing intermediate step:
https://theintercept.com/2017/02/20/how-to-run-a-rogue-government-twitter-account-with-an-anonymous-email-address-and-a-burner-phone/
But the Boing Boing summary was funnier.
There's a guy who writes for Esquire who argues that basically all of the so-called insider accounts are likely fake trolls.
I also didn't realize how hard it is to get an anonymous email address these days!
I likely created my twitter account way before they had phone verification, but when I tried using their API I hit the phone verification road block.
It was however easily resolved by requesting the twitter support via email to grant me permission to create an API key without the verification.
This makes me think it may be possible to register an account via email as well, if you contact the support.
Maybe I should try that next...
Huh? Why a burner phone? Why not use the email address to sign up for a free SIP account that drops the incoming voice and texts into emails ?
It's also possible to rent a number with bitcoin: https://smsprivacy.org/
The problem is that you usually end up with a "used" one, that has already been verified to another throwaway account.