I'm very heartened by Twitter taking this approach to protect their users, but it comes about a week after I was very disappointed by the process of signing up for a Twitter account through Tor. I wanted an account that wasn't linked to me personally -- it was at least partially an experiment in anonymity, but it failed completely when Twitter blocked my signup until I provided a verifiable phone number.

Twitter denies this in the article, of course:

>(Twitter has denied blocking Tor. In September, Twitter spokesperson Nu Wexler told Motherboard, “Twitter does not block Tor, and many Twitter users rely on the Tor network for the important privacy and security it provides. Occasionally, signups and logins may be asked to phone verify if they exhibit spam-like behavior. This is applicable to all IPs and not just Tor IPs.”)

I get why they want to keep suspicious actors out of their ecosystem, but the only suspicious thing I did was try to be anonymous. If protecting people from "state-sponsored attack" was actually a priority, they'd figure out ways to enable people to protect themselves.