General Question

Ginxa's avatar

Do social sites weed out non-mobile phone users? hence the request for mobile phone numbers before acceptance onto social site.

Asked by Ginxa (5points) October 28th, 2021

People without mobile phones can’t join social sites so are they unwelcome. Rejection of people without mobile phones can no longer remain on social sites. Doesn’t this seem discriminatory?

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7 Answers

Mimishu1995's avatar

I can still go on FB with my computer, and there are things on social media that work better to me on the computer than my phone, so your premise is faulty.

Response moderated (Spam)
Forever_Free's avatar

It is not a means of discrimination of non-mobile phone users.

They are doing it for security reasons by enabling multi-factor authentication. You log in, they send a code to your phone, you enter the code and allowed on. Thus authentication your known password and a second factor. Expect more of these techniques to better secure your access.

Zaku's avatar

I mean, if they do, they suck. I’ve not encountered that, and have accounts that don’t have my phone number on Zuckface, Reddit, Discord, Stack Exchange, YouTube, Imgur, and who knows what else (I give almost zero Internet sites my phone number), but it sucks if it exists.

This seems to be a spam question, though, self-answered by another spam account with answer #2 there.

@Forever_Free You’re not going to be “forever free” for very long if you enable others’ BS behavior with apologist rationalizations. 2-factor ID that requires a phone is both discrimination and an information power grab.

Forever_Free's avatar

@Zaku There are other methods that don’t require phone for more factor authentication. It is just one that has been adopted and accepted.
Bottom line, if you don’t like it, don’t use it. The OP wanted to know if it was discriminatory to non-mobile phone users.
Do you have any other thoughts for the OP?

Zaku's avatar

I’ll be very relieved if the OP is not a sock puppet account created by the same person or bot who created the account that answered this question second.

Especially because I am sympathetic to the POV implied by their tags, even if I disagree with some aspects of the question’s assumptions or framing.

My other thoughts would be elaborations, such as no, most social sites don’t do that, and sites that do press for a mobile phone in that way or others are being discriminatory and exclusionist, intentionally or passively, and are disrespecting privacy and trying to manipulate people into over-identifying themselves and linking their accounts to phones so they can data-mine the bejeebus out of them.

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