I'm old school and I made accounts for various social media I think several years ago back before they even had phone verification on a lot of these sites and some of it is just flat out broken unless you attach a phone number to them now and I simply wasn't prepared for how much cancer was involved lol. Just about managed to get it working but these sites really do break without a working phone number.
I wanted to scrub my big tech presence for the most part and just leave my youtube channel there to prevent any potential hostile takeover and clean up the history so everything is more consistent for my alt-tech stuff in the searches. To think as well they're going to make everything even worse now, we're going to have to give safety lectures to the next generations about internet security and what really happens with social media history. Got to think carefully about where you post your stuff because some of them don't even have delete options to at least take your stuff off the sites. We all know the fuckers will likely keep secret backups for the glowies to peruse even if you can delete stuff off the front end.
I think advising people use burner phones for any social media is going to be sound security advice at this point and always post up fake data.
I keep a cheap voip number for most sites. I'm not very integrated into big tech though. I was never a big user anyway, but I totally disconnected from all of them. Almost everything I've said controversial would be limited to here and I suppose a tiny bit on Reddit that's been nuked for almost 3 years now. I don't think Reddit was ever on my actual e-mail address. This site doesn't have my e-mail. They'd have to use my IP to match me up, which might work ok for a hostile takeover of the site and possibly my ISP or middle-men like Cloudflare.
Still, I'm not naive enough to think I'm not constantly tracked despite my measures. I just try to not be the easiest in an algorithm and keep from being a product to big tech as much as I can. If the government wants to get me, well my name is kinda unique and it's not like they can't just look up my address in some tax records. It's not going to take much. I tried to tell some January 6 people that was a trap for the very same reasons. If you're going for something like that, either have to win or have an incredibly solid plan of ingress/egress that involves leaving cell phones behind, not flying to DC, not renting a car to drive there, perhaps not using your own car, measures to evade surveillance. Even then, you're likely to fail at it.
The US government is unbelievably good at surveillance when they want to be, they just choose not to target retail theft rings or antifa cells.
They have that monster data center in the desert out in Utah. Supposedly it has the capacity to back up the entire internet at set intervals. So they can rewind the whole thing and see what was posted at a certain date even if it was later deleted.
SNDL (Store Now - Decrypt Later). Would not be surprised if the US has more Data centers like that.
They have gotten worse at that, sure. Still helps me a ton. I also use for many of the two-factor authentication things that don't seem to care. If they want my actual cell I decide if it's worth it or not. Often that leans it to not.