sure, here’s my ID:🖕
Well this is going to cause some confusion when you and I get our IDs printed… Can’t be helped, though.
Fuck that guy.
If that ever comes to pass I just would not use the sites.
Exactly. I’m almost there with YouTube if I don’t find solution to this:
So, I’m going to offer a dissenting opinion. Please hear me out before piling on.
The anonymous internet is going to kill the internet. Without verification and attachment back to a real human, eventually the internet will just be flooded with bots, misinformation, and unverifiable information. The dead internet theory.
So, yes, we all worry about “Chinese style social credit scores” or corporate ownership of ID or whatever other dystopian bullshit… But what if you just want to have a site where people can talk to one another and know that they’re people that actually have to take responsibility for what they say.
Anyway, I suspect that this will start in isolation. Like when the internet was young and communities were forming with knots of small people… Forums with full verification requirements or similar. Then they will grow once their quality exceeds everything else.
Discuss!
Plenty of verified people provide disinformation and trolling. There’s an entire American cable news channel dedicated to it. Several now, really.
The problem isn’t that people spread disinformation, it’s that people believe it without verifying. We need to increase peoples ability to utilize critical thinking skills, not somehow stem the unending tide of bullshittery.
There will always be snake oil salesman seeking to profit off the gullibility of the general public. The solution isn’t to kill all the salesman, it’s to teach people to be less gullible.
Exactly. People don’t check because they’re lazy. No amount of verification can counter that.
I’m only partly ok with it if it comes with anonymization of my identity. It should be possible to authenticate yourself without anybody knowing who you are or knowing that you authenticated. Maybe we could use an ID card scanner that generates some sort of code that can be used for anonymous identity validation.
We should also be a lot harder on social media companies that abuse our data. These companies should not be allowed to exist.
I’m only partly ok with it if it comes with anonymization of my identity.
It won’t.
We should also be a lot harder on social media companies that abuse our data. These companies should not be allowed to exist.
They’re already too powerful, even without a monopoly on authentication.
There’s 2 different things here:
- Anonymity
- Truth (of people and / or info)
You need both or you’re loosing freedom of speech.
If the government is “nice“, then you won’t feel threatened by this and you’ll believe that it’s better because we can now find the “bad guys”.
But what if the rules change and your thoughts / feelings / beliefs are now “bad”… how do you band together to make it better?
And, the internet is already flooded by bots, well, at least 50%, but I’m guessing no-one’s noticed.
I think there’s a place for both. So long as none of it becomes mandatory, and online communities can freely choose to offer anonymous or verified identities, it’s an idea worth trying.
I tend to agree. Admittedly without having thought too deeply about how it would work, I kinda think there needs to be 2 internets: one that is anonymous and one that isn’t. The anonymous one is vital for people to be able to freely dissent from and protest their government, etc. The non-anonymous one would be, as you said, something that can assess responsibility back to specific people. Idk. I’m just spit balling. Fascism, through unchecked capitalism, is killing the Internet. 🫤
Even with verification the Internet will be full of misinformation.
Let’s look at the recent 2024 Springfield pet-eating hoax. A woman, who I can lookup the name of, posted that she heard people in her neighborhood were eating cats and dogs. That misinformation quickly spread and was shouted at a US Presidential debate.
While the woman who originally posted it apologized, no one who spread that misinformation did.
While verification might help keep some people honest, it’s likely only going to keep those already honest, honest.
I agree. Not thought about it a lot, but there should be some way to use your ID for stuff like that without telling every service out there your full personal details.
Except this is not about ending anonymity in favor of John Buddy Smith, ID 1234-567890, this is about pseudonymity using cryptographic identities.
And also, as you might have noticed, platforms are fine with their own bots or bots they’ve been paid to allow in.
Which means that for any kind of real verification you need a transparent system, communities allowing or not allowing something are not enough, any such authority is a point of failure. Transparent like e-mail or e-news, except one can do better now.
One way around this is to nationalize social media companies. Use public funding to run the service instead of private companies and run the service in the same way as licensing a vehicle to drive on the highway.
Social media has essentially become a public necessity that everyone wants and needs, it should be run and regulated like the public water system. It should be run, controlled, regulated and monitored by a system like the postal service where it isn’t designed to make money but instead concentrate all is activity into just providing a critical independent service to everyone.
Then the state acquires the ability to spy on all your communications, and when the state is taken over by bad actors (as now), they can use that to blackmail, bully or worse.
I imagine it would make fake-account-driven influence operations much harder, and it might drive down total online time.
