The phone number you're trying to use is already associated with another Twitter account

[stefan]

I’m trying to add a phone number to a new account, but I’m running into a problem.

The phone number you're trying to use is already associated with another Twitter account

Texting STOP to 40404 doesn’t seem to work, I think I might have hit the limit of how many times I can use the same phone number for account creation.

Can anyone help?

[stefan]

I already opened three support tickets, the first two were closed without being resolved.

Is there anyone I can speak with directly?

Also, I would like to point out that it doesn’t make much sense to verify your developer account with a phone number and then also needing to do the same for each new account you intend to use as a bot.

There should be a way to either associate your developer account with those bots, or perhaps with the application, which is tied to your account.

[LeBraat]

Hey @stefan,

My apologies for the delayed response here. I will make sure to bring up your case with a couple of colleagues first thing on Monday.

[stefan]

Thank you, I appreciate it!

I’d also love to hear what you think about my suggestion on managing multiple connected accounts.

[LeBraat]

Hey Stefan,

Our product team has been investigating this and I am waiting for a response from them. I’ll keep you updated.

[stefan]

Thank you!

[LeBraat]

Hello @stefan,

We are not going to be extending the number of accounts with which you can associate a single phone number. Would you mind sharing your use case?

[stefan]

To give you a specific example, I manage a semi-automated Twitter account for a personal project. If this account receives a tweet via DM from someone it follows (these are considered to be the account administrators), it retweets that tweet. This lets us retweet tweets without having to switch between accounts.

Now, I would like to set up a new account for another small personal project that has the same functionality, but I need to verify this new account with a phone number. For companies with a budget – and spammers, this is not a problem, because they all can easily get a new phone number just for that account, or use services like Twilio or Google Voice.

I understand there are other solutions to this particular use case, but generally speaking, I would like to see a system that lets me create automated Twitter accounts that follow Twitter’s TOS without having to actually circumvent those rules. I think the best solution here would be letting me tie multiple accounts together so that I only need to verify one account.

You could even go one step further and let developers create designated bot accounts that would be both tied to their developer account and marked as bots, similarly to how Slack or Mastodon do it.

[Connexinet]

Here are more use cases:

1. Personal vs business account (businesses usually have landline and can’t receive SMS)
2. Test accounts: If you are testing tweet functions, you don’t want to spam your real followers with test tweets all day

[humancell]

Hello,

With all of the changes lately, you’ve shutdown all of my experimental and information bots that I’ve created for customers. This weekend, I thought I would see what I have to do get them back online … and I’m stuck as it’s asking for a phone number on many of those other accounts.

For example, I have a script that I developed for a church that tweets bible verses. It’s just a cron job and they manage the content. The best part is that I also set-up a Twilio OpenVBX for them, and you are rejecting the phone numbers for Twilio as not an acceptable operator.

I also wrote some IBM Node-RED flows for another customer to tweet some crypto-currency price information. He has his own twitter account … and no other phone number … so that one is shut down too.

I have another IBM Node-RED flow that was gathering IoT data and air quality … and it’s now off-line … and there is no other phone number … but mine! And I have my own twitter account.

Will you allow use to link multiple accounts to the same phone number? This does not seem to be working … and now I can’t get these customers back up and running.

Can you allow my personal account to be authorized to tweet to another account?

How can we resolve this as I want to get these all back up and running.

Thanks!

[LeBraat]

You can use your phone number on multiple accounts. There is an upper limit for this though. You can use Google phone numbers, but you can only associate a Google phone number with a single account.

Is there any way you could use your customer’s phone numbers?

Can you allow my personal account to be authorized to tweet to another account?

When you say ‘personal account’, do you mean your personal developer account? You can use 3-legged oauth to authorize your apps to make requests to our APIs on behalf of other users. Does this help?

[humancell]

Well … that is good to hear you can use the same number on multiple accounts. Per your other comments:

1. Why can’t I use my Twilio numbers, since that is what my business - and my customers businesses - use? I have several instances of OpenVBX up and running for call routing, etc.

2. My customers are all using Twilio numbers … and your system is rejecting those numbers.

3. I’m reading the “3-legged oauth” now, but you are saying that this will allow my application to send tweets as a 3rd party? Meaning they can authorize my application to send tweets as them?

Thanks!

[LeBraat]

Let me get back to you on your first two questions.

On #3, you are correct. 3-legged oauth allows users to authorize your application to make requests on behalf of them.

[craft_ryan]

Hi LeBraat,

Thanks for giving us insight and researching these issues. Another related data point and context for you:

Hundreds of users of our app, @GroupTweet, are teachers that want to use GroupTweet to create and setup a new “classroom Twitter account”. This requires the teacher to create a new Twitter account separate from their personal account that they will then use with GroupTweet to allow multiple student’s to all Tweet from.

The problem is (and I’ve just confirmed all of this myself) is that when creating a new Twitter account, your signup flow gives the option of using Email instead of a phone number. So teachers fill in the email and think they are set. However in roughly 5-10 minutes without doing anything - without authorizing any third party apps or performing any “unusual behavior” their accounts are locked.

In reality they just need to add their phone number. However why make legitimate users jump through these hoops? If you are 100% set on needing a phone number for every account, that’s a shame, but at the very least you should be upfront about that during the signup process and not even give users the opportunity to use email if that will just cause their accounts to be locked in 5 minutes anyway.

I confirmed this problem just now by performing the following steps:

1. Sign up for new account on cellular hotspot and in incognito mode to eliminate any cookie tracking or ip address tracking.

2. Used email instead of phone number for Twitter account signup

3. Posted two regular tweets. Without links. Text only

4. Navigated to a random users Twitter profile and read their tweets.

5. Then it automatically refreshed the page about 5 minutes later to a screen saying my “account has been locked” and I need to pass a reCAPTCHA challend and verify a phone number.

[Rymo_98]

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