This issue with going down the ip route of moderation is that it’s not something that can identify a user. most ISPs in the UK are IPv4 only and are rotated dynamically. It’s not too difficult to force your ISP to assign you with a new one. Often these IPs can shared too and NAT only makes things worse. then there’s IPv6, that would be a game of cat and mouse. Then there are folks who need to rely on TOR or VPN for access to the internet in order to circumvent censorship or anti net neutrality or surveillance policies.
In short, IP should be a last resort in mitigating spam.
phone number verification seems to be the way many companies are heading in in order to reduce the number of bad actors within their communities. Personally I don’t like that because I’m hesitant to handing over my mobile number to just anybody. I learned the hard way what happens when you do that with your email and companies don’t use best efforts to guard my email from threat actors or respect my privacy. Every morning I wake up to about 20 emails in my personal inbox, and I’m lucky if one or two are genuine emails. I don’t want the same eventually happening to my mobile number.
An approval process appears to now be in place, or is slowly being implemented. I’m aware of 2 trusted users informing of posts that had been held for approval.
The Facebook data breach from 2019 that was recently made publicly available online is a crass reminder that nowhere is safe. I’ve been combing through all the data for research and to alert some friends, and there’s certainly a correlation between those who are in the breach and the number of spam calls and texts they receive.
@davidwalton beat me to this stuff by sharing the link as I was typing it out!
Even Mark Zuckerberg isn’t impervious. UserID #4 had their phone number in the dump too.
16506447386:4:Mark:Zuckerberg:male:Palo Alto, California:Dobbs Ferry, New York:Married:Chan Zuckerberg Initiative:1/10/2019 12:00:00 AM::05/14/1984
There aren’t too many emails from what I’ve assimilated myself thus far, so im not sure how much help haveibeenpwned.com will be. This breach I think stresses the importance of the realisation that mobile numbers are the new email, SMS is just as insecure, and we need to take the same measures to safeguard our numbers as we do with our emails to mitigate this stuff. and importantly, there’s a clear void of any such service similar to haveibeenpwned for phone numbers, and we sorely need one.
I’m saying that was the mobile number tied to his own Facebook account on October 1 January 10, 2019. Can’t discern any more than that from that the data. In any case, I’m sure it’ll have been changed by now.
Their is a better site in my opinion, to access all the features it does require a fee in crypto( I haven’t upgraded, I got a free week from BHF )
But it tells you passwords, phone numbers, home addresses and even family members names, bank information, email used, common username used and dob + more
I searched my friend on it(she was with me): I entered Megan {lastname} then her town name.
Seconds after her phone address and all the passwords she uses and the passwords was her dogs name even some of the sites she’s signed up with and that she has a hsbc account with her details to it that she had used on Reddit that got stole.
I’d be intrigued to see if I’m on there… doesn’t seem large enough to have that much information about everyone. TBH I always assume anything I put on facebook is public.
makes this 
a sobering amount clearer…