What do you use the internet for? Entertainment, education, sharing art, communication, marketing, listening to music, blogging and much more. There are so many possibilities and they only keep growing. Recently, social media has allowed communities to come together and do all of that in one single place. One of these platforms is Twitter.

In Twitter, you create short posts with less than 280 characters and share them with your followers, plus you can also add videos and images to them. Twitter has been marketed as a microblogging platform; a lot of online businesses have a Twitter page where they post updates, freelancers and small teams can advertise their services and products, content creators and influencers can share their stories and create communities around them, users can interact with many different outlets, choose what interests them and follow their favorite accounts. Twitter is a perfect example of the power of the internet to do many different things.

This social platform was created in 2006 by Jack Dorsey and Noah Glass. The service started out as an idea that allowed members in small groups to communicate with each other via SMS messages. The first prototype was used as an internal service in Dorsey’s company, Odeo. Two years later, Twitter had around 100 million tweets every three months. The platform grew extremely quickly, and it was helped by major usage spikes in events like the 2010 FIFA World Cup. Today, Twitter is one of the biggest and most recognizable brands in the world, with more than 330 million users by the first quarter of 2019.

Unfortunately, Twitter has a lot of cans of worms; for example: bots. It gives a lot of control to developers on posting content programmatically. This allows users to make bots to respond to certain events. Some use bots to create spam or to create quick non-organic growth for accounts to sell their products. Bots have also been shown to be able to influence public opinion and spread misinformation by simulating human communication. For this reason, bots have been used for propaganda purposes in many different countries. There are even companies made with the sole purpose of selling followers, tweets, retweets and favorites. Some of these companies create click bots to make users (including politicians and celebrities) seem more popular.

And while bots are certainly a whole topic full of controversy, humans on Twitter can also be as bad. Campaigns of harassment against minority groups have been common in the past, and Twitter has been strongly criticized for it. This platform has had to deal with the dilemma between punishing hate speech and being accused of censorship for blocking such messages.

However, perhaps the most controversial topic regarding Twitter has to do with privacy. There are a lot of ways in which using a service like this can disturb your online privacy. A lot of bugs and security exploits have been repeatedly found on Twitter in the past: in 2010, a glitch was found that allowed a Twitter user to force others to follow them without their consent or knowledge, a bug in 2019 allowed sharing of location details from iOS systems without the user’s consent, and in 2018 Twitter sent emails to all users saying that their passwords were stored unencrypted in their servers due to an error. If a malicious party happened to find some breach to your data, they could do some serious damage.

Twitter is also forced to provide any information about their user base to the government if they ask for it. It’s normal to feel like these policies are invasive on your privacy, especially with so much important data living on the web nowadays. Because of this, you may want to use Twitter with additional measures to protect yourself.

One of the best tools for this are virtual numbers. With these, you can sign up for a Twitter account without giving away your real phone Number. In this guide made for the US, you’ll learn how to create a Twitter account without using your real number.

Step 1: go to Twitter

Type “Twitter” on your main browser and click on the first link.

On the main page, click on “sign up with phone or email”.

You’ll see a small form asking you to provide some information about yourself, fill it out except the phone number section, you’ll need a virtual number for this.

Step 2: how to get your Non VoIP number

Go to our website, and sign in. Create your account if you don’t already have one by clicking on “Sign Up”. You’ll find both of these options at our homepage’s top menu.

At the top right, you should be seeing a small tab that says “United States”, if you don’t, change it by clicking on it and choosing “United States” as your country.

Now, on the left menu click on “Services” and then on “Short-term numbers”.

On the search bar, type “Twitter” and click on “Purchase”.

Mark the checkbox and confirm your purchase. Then, hit “Next”.

Now you should be seeing your temporary number. Copy and paste it on Twitter’s page, but don’t close that tab, you’ll need it to receive your code.

Step 3: getting the code

Click on “Next” back on Twitter, then follow “step 2 of 5” to customize your experience. After this, click on “Next”.

Now, click on “Sign Up” and you’ll see a small notification tab saying they’ll send you a verification code.

Click on “Next” back on your Major Phones account to get your code.

Type it onto Twitter’s page and click on “Next”.

After that, all you have to do is to set up your account, so you’ll be asked to provide a photo, a bio, and a username. Then, you’ll be asked about your interests, but you can choose to “Skip now” if you want to do this later.

And you’re in!

Congrats! Now that you’ve created your account with one of our temporary numbers, you’re able to keep up with the news around you, grow your business, join communities, and much more, all without using your phone number. Go ahead and start enjoying this great app!