An observation from having to use some China-only social media apps recently:

Ways they’ve minimized bots:
1. make it extremely difficult to get a china phone number
2. Phone number sign up only
3. Make the sign up verification process quite difficult for bot (temporary #) but easy for ppl with “real phone number”
4. They disabled international access 😒

Not sure it was an intentional goal but less bots on social media is really quite nice.

So I still haven’t been able to get a Weibo account 🥺

@kangaroo5383 This also completely deanonymizes any and all interaction made on that account, as even if you were to join a private support group, your verification number will be an instant ID on you. It's effective, but I'm strongly against this method.

Also it's weak to SIM spoofing, from a security perspective.

@skywalker6705 agree on sim spoofing, tho anonymization could theoretically done even with this method of authentication if there are incentives there. As in you can decouple “acceptance onto platform” and “identity on the platform”