To take advantage of two-factor authentication via SMS, you’ll now need to sign up for Twitter Blue. For non-subscribers who have activated this technique, it will need to be removed, at the risk of losing access to your account.
On Twitter and like many other apps, there are three main double authentication techniques to strengthen the security of your account: by SMS, by an authenticator app like Google Authenticator, and by a security key.
Problem: To take advantage of 2FA over SMS, you will now have to pay for Twitter. In fact, only the Twitter Blue subscription will offer this kind of functionality, we learn in a official blog post. In France, this package is billed as a reminder at 11 euros per month.
Abuse, according to Twitter
To justify this choice, the blue bird platform explains that this protocol has been abused by malicious people, without going into details. Therefore, consider it smarter to switch to double authentication via a dedicated app or security key.
Journalist Maxime “OtaXou” Lancelin-Golbery, who obviously activated 2FA via SMS without being a Twitter Blue subscriber, received a message that couldn’t be clearer:
«Only Twitter Blue subscribers can use two-factor authentication via SMS. A few minutes are enough to remove it. You can still use the authenticator app and password methods ».
HAHAHAHA Twitter is Elon Musk pic.twitter.com/deGwFlWnJk
— OtaXou (Maxime) (@OtaXou) February 18, 2023
The rest of the message does not go four ways: if you do not respect this rule, you will simply stop having access to the social network. “To avoid losing your access to Twitter, remove SMS two-factor authentication by March 19, 2023“. March 19 is obviously the deadline set by the company. Rest assured, the other two techniques are still relevant, but may be less practical.
For Maxime “OtaXou” Lancelin-Golbery, this decision has economic interests. “Two-factor via SMS is less secure than via app, but the servers that manage the texts are more expensive“, he explains. For him, this will allow him to Twitter “save money and potentially push the less tech into the blue».
How to disable double SMS authentication on Twitter?
In any case, Twitter doesn’t give you a choice if you don’t want to subscribe to Twitter Blue. To deactivate this method, you must go to the account settings and respect the following path:
- The privacy settings ;
- Security and access to the account;
- Security ;
- Two-factor authentication;
- Uncheck SMS.
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