While I'd love to attribute this to data harvesting and don't love Meta as a company, as someone who has tried to scrape Instagram in the past (to get recent images users have posted for specific restaurants), I believe this is a reasonable measure to increase the cost of new spam accounts.
The cost of an email is virtually 0. The cost of a unique phone number that can receive text-messages is non-zero. This was a pain in the butt for me, as you often have to get a real phone number (they reject VoIP ones) and that takes more work to get working.
Bots and scraping is a huge issue for Instagram. Instagram really dislikes the fact that you can buy a lot of likes for very cheap, so I kinda understand why they do this.
The cost of an email is virtually 0. The cost of a unique phone number that can receive text-messages is non-zero. This was a pain in the butt for me, as you often have to get a real phone number (they reject VoIP ones) and that takes more work to get working.
Bots and scraping is a huge issue for Instagram. Instagram really dislikes the fact that you can buy a lot of likes for very cheap, so I kinda understand why they do this.