Some streamers I know were reluctant to even enable email verification when it was an ON/OFF option. Despite it being the first thing twitch (any many websites) asked you when you sign up.
With the recent release of phone verification and the options to choose account age exceptions, I've seen better adoption of the tools.
We should have the same granular options for follows.
Example, not allowing a follow unless email or phone is verified, but if phone isn't verified they can follow if the account is so many weeks/months old.
This would help with brand new accounts following just to harass with their names. But allow accounts that have been around longer being more likely to be legit. That isn't always the case, thus the granular option for the streamer. Such as "I only want follows from people that have been active on twitch for a while without violating TOS. Then its ok if they haven't verified phone. But if you're fairly new, gotta verify the number"

This. My account has been follow-botted non-stop for the last month, and it doesn't look like it's stopping. This has resulted in not being able to use follow alerts - the bots follow fast and hard when whoever is doing it takes manual control, and there also seems to be an automated process constantly driving them at my channel. I have Sery_bot activated now to remove them once they have followed, but they still trigger the alerts, and it isn't a pleasant experience for either me or the viewer. One issue with using a phone number is that the same number can be assigned to a different account. If something like Sery_bot could be introduced as a breaker before the request gets actioned by the account, that would be great. For example, at the moment it's - follow request, account accepts request, alert gets triggered, Sery-bot evaluates and removes the follow if deemed to be a followbot. This makes spam. If Twitch could integrate something like - follow request, Sery-bot evaluates and removes the follow if deemed to be a followbot, account accepts request that makes it through the Sery_boy filter, Alert gets triggered. No spam. I know Twitch doesn't make Sery_bot, but somebody could contact the creator for assistance (if needed) with making an automatic feature that performs this task. It might not be 100% protection, but it would be way better than the current level of no protection, and reduce spam. I spent hours removing over 2000 followers, and was only able to report 15 of the bots before further bot reports generated an "internal error" (I was quite willing to one-by-one submit a report for each bot). I suspect that my account is also being monitored for attack, and triggered, by the lurkers I get in my channel when I am offline also. Getting rid of these accounts permanently would be good too.

This is such a critical feature we need that would exponentially increase safety for all streamers.
If we only had verified users being able to follow us as an option, this would save so many headaches for all marginalized streamers, this would largely reduce the amount of trolls that trigger alerts, disrupt chat, and community without needing to have an obnoxious amount of secondary moderation tools.

Sure I can prevent people from typing in my chat (verified chat mode, sub mode etc), but I can't prevent them from interacting with my stream and thats a problem.

A streamer should be able to choose if a non verified user can interact with their community, or stream period.

Yeah Sean, OK GOSH! Wait, Tom and Eric who are we talking to? Why are we saying random names?

OK sean

OK sean

Some people have expressed concern over needing to verify via phone number, in which case we came up with an alternate that seems to please more people: A setting you can Enable, that is off by default, that would require 2FA in order to follow a streamer, use channel points, and otherwise interact with the stream.

An alternative method to this whole issue would be to have everyone disable any VPN during account creation that would allow Twitch to track account creations that happen in bulk coming from one source.