It's not just related to spam, it's also a great opportunity to collect personal data under the excuse of "security", just like they insist you enable SMS 2FA (for some reason they never insist so much about TOTP or WebAuthn/U2F 2FA, since those can't be abused to get the user's phone number).

Yes, I went through this just yesterday while trying to set up a company account. To get it unblocked I had to:

* Verify an email address through an OTP.

* Verify a phone number through an OTP.

* Upload a picture of me with my face in it, holding a piece of paper with my name, username and a six digit code they gave me written on it.

I'm very pissed.

Facebook was already caught using 2FA phone numbers for ad targeting, and they have also collected biometric data without consent for years, so you can fully expect that picture of your face to be eventually used in illegal ways by Meta.

why would you volunteer all of that personal information??

Need to get paid, need to do my job to do that.

Twitter is also more aggressive with verification challenges when I use a VPN.