though I can understand the phone number thing.

Twitter is flooded with bots with pretty advanced AI even. Reddit too btw. This is why you always see this gigantic leftist echo chamber in my opinion. It's maybe 50% real people + 50% bots, + their left-leaning algorithms & anti-conservative rules (= banning) who convince people that this is "what people generally think".

And it is easy to create thousands of fake emails for login (reddit doesn't even require confirmation mail).

The only thing that makes it hard is to have a phone-# requirement, which is burned with first registration.

Bot-farms can't just acquire thousands of unique phone numbers.

Parler is probably another honeypot.