What The F* is Twitter Trying To Pull?

I've never really used Twitter, but decided to create one in order to expand my social media foot-print for business purposes. So, I go and create an account. They ask for a phone number but offer the option to skip, so I skip that portion, of course. The next thing I know, my account is some how flagged and I can no longer continue setting things up with out providing a phone number.

Now, I hadn't even had the chance to post a single Tweet, much less upload a profile picture or banner/cover photo. Yet, somehow, Twitter said "automated behavior" was detected from my account. I know that Facebook sends you an email prevent you from signing up with a bogus email or to prevent bots from making mass accounts, but I never received an email from Twitter asking for confirmation nor do I know if Twitter has the same policy of sending an email in order to confirm an account. I initially assumed they did. So, after I created my account, I did check my email. Nothing from Twitter.

What the fu*k? What did I do, exactly? Besides literally NOTHING since I hadn't even had a chance to do anything to resemble any sort of account activity, be it automated or not...

I guess this is just their way of forcing people to fork over their phone numbers in a fascist-style attempt to acquire as much information about people as possible? Now, I've made Twitter accounts before but never actually used them, and NEVER have I had this happen.

So, the only thing left to assume is that this is an attempt to acquire as much personal information about people as possible and the option to "skip" the portion where they ask for your phone number, is purely a mechanism to make people FEEL as though Twitter isn't trying to collect information from users, or in this case, since I didn't even get a chance to actually use the platform, to collect information from anyone even interested in using Twitter.

It's absolutely disgusting.

So, with that being said, is there any alternative to Twitter? Maybe something built on the Steem Platform that I don't know about? I know that there is Dtube, which is an alternative to YouTube.

If you know of something please let me know in the comments.

[[EDIT: I've found Gab.ai and Zappl.io (built on the Steem platform) are both great twitter alternatives!]]