Thanks for this - I've had a fuzzy assumption this was occurring over the last decade. I've noticed variations of this strategy to swarm certain trending posts on various platforms (particularly reddit) with an assortment of low-effort, vaguely positive and pro-CCP comments. Lately I've seen this frequently on Shanghai posts about the extreme situation unfolding there.

Funny, I've also noticed this strategy is very common in the cryptocurrency space, especially in Telegram groups. Signal-to-noise is abysmal.

No, I think what they're suggesting is preventing actors from creating thousands of accounts and having bots run them. Although it's not as easy as accounts can still be bought or hacked of course.

There are some approaches that suggest something similar as you say, not for every post but an occasional proof that you're human, like once a month. Check out IDENA.

Of the three accounts I’ve created — one as recent as 2020 — I can’t recall any verification process which so much as required me to put in a real name.

That's not really a 1:1 comparison. You don't go through any identify verification process, other than "First name Last name." Go on Facebook Marketplace, there are dozens upon dozens of dup accounts solely for the purposes of evading a bad review, or to scam people outright.

vs.

An application process, with identification verification. While optional, would allow any one who cares about their feed to completely turn off anyone who could be a scammer or bot. I don't remember that option in Facebook. I would definitely have it turned on.

Not sure how these are even remotely comparable.

Look at Amazon. Fake accounts are hard, so hard to make that they sell in the $1000s. Then it's still incredibly hard to actually use that fake account because so many actions will get them suspended. That's not to say Amazon isn't rampant with scams because the profit incentives from a single account are so great. You can sell a couple hundred 2TB Thumb drives for $30 per day and it will take a month or longer to accumulate enough bad reviews to have the account shutdown.

I don't think the profit motivations on Twitter will be similar enough.

It's not, your real name is one of the less useful pieces of data used in ad targeting.

It's because Facebook is for old people, who remember phonebooks and letters to the editor and are impressed when they see a real name and think it's authentic.

Of course, in practice they're just as vicious to each other under their real names.