At the WEF, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez calls for the end of anonymity on social media by forcing them to link all user accounts with the European digital identity wallet.
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.
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.
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’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 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. 🫤
A lot of the bad stuff that happens on the internet is directly related to perceived anonymity. If you want to bully, harass, make bigoted statements, disseminate propaganda, or shill for a corporation, it’s better to be anonymous. If a country gives its citizens the right to free speech and reasonable protections for privacy, a non-anonymous internet is better. Besides, anonymity on the internet is an illusion for about 99% of internet users. All of the big social media companies know who you are - their whole business depends on the data they collect on you, and that data is worth much less if it can’t be associated with an individual. They also have heavy incentives to share that information with the government. Try making an ‘anonymous’ threat against your country’s leader and see if any law-enforcement types decide to visit you.
There’s two points of consideration here, let’s see if I can make my point without a wall of text, I’m prone to those…
Anonimity: the fact that where you connect cannot know who exactly you are. This should be straightforward, anonimity should not be taken away, it is a core part of the internet in my opinion. It’s extremely important that we can express ourselves freely without fear of being persecuted. Despite the negative sides that it has, as those with ill intent will be harder to find (but not impossible). In this the common quote attributed to Franklin applies well in my opinion: Those who sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither.
Proof of personhood: basically the difficult task of making sure that the other end of an internet connection has a real person, and together with that, proof that it is different than others, the ability to know you are you and not someone else.
This is incredibly interesting as a technical problem to be solved, and I do agree with you that the internet as we know it is at risk if we don’t solve it properly. It is specially hard to solve if you try to guarantee anonimity (like I believe it should be).
Personally I have been quite carefully interested into the whole World ID solution, using a device called orb with open specifications that captures some data from your iris that should be unique per person, storing only an encrypted piece of information in a blockchain and on your device locally so that you can use it to identify yourself as a real unique person and only once, but wherever you use it, cannot know anything about you except that. There’s a lot of possible criticism to such a system, but insofar as I have checked and can understand, it seems like a legit solution. But I leave here the link for anyone interested enough to check it themselves: https://world.org/world-id
As a queer person I’m being very careful about what I say in various spaces right now given the current context. Thinking about replacing accounts that are more tied to me and making some.
Also thinking to use local LLMs to rephrase what I post so writing pattern detection won’t work.
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.
Why look to a (oversized) stick to deal with behavior by some people that may be brought on by lack of responsibility? Consider carrots: rewards for good behavior.
The internet is probably not worth losing privacy, which protects your freedom, anyway.
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.
And they will spy on us, at some point, if this were to be allowed to pass. Not a question of “if” the government will abuse it, but “which” government will abuse it.
Do we allow private enterprise total control over social media who then use their control to flood society with their propaganda use their power to blackmail, control, bully or worse.
OR
Do we allow government agencies total control over social media who then use their control to flood society with their propaganda use their power to blackmail, control, bully or worse.
At least with the publicly controlled government option, we would all have some measure of control or regulation. It would take a lot more organization and complication for bad actors to manipulate the message because they first have to take control of government.
Leaving control of social media in private hands means we’ve already given up control because bad actors can just buy whatever message they want and push it to everyone. Their message and manipulation guides everyone to the government they want. Bad actors win because they have control of social media and can win control of government.
The game is already set. We want to argue that the government shouldn’t have control of these things because we don’t/won’t/can’t trust government … but we are more than willing to put our trust in private for profit corporations.
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.
You’re probably right
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’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.
It won’t.
They’re already too powerful, even without a monopoly on authentication.
Too powerful in what way? More power than they should have? Definitely. Too powerful to be stopped? I don’t think so.
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. 🫤
A lot of the bad stuff that happens on the internet is directly related to perceived anonymity. If you want to bully, harass, make bigoted statements, disseminate propaganda, or shill for a corporation, it’s better to be anonymous. If a country gives its citizens the right to free speech and reasonable protections for privacy, a non-anonymous internet is better. Besides, anonymity on the internet is an illusion for about 99% of internet users. All of the big social media companies know who you are - their whole business depends on the data they collect on you, and that data is worth much less if it can’t be associated with an individual. They also have heavy incentives to share that information with the government. Try making an ‘anonymous’ threat against your country’s leader and see if any law-enforcement types decide to visit you.
There’s two points of consideration here, let’s see if I can make my point without a wall of text, I’m prone to those…
Anonimity: the fact that where you connect cannot know who exactly you are. This should be straightforward, anonimity should not be taken away, it is a core part of the internet in my opinion. It’s extremely important that we can express ourselves freely without fear of being persecuted. Despite the negative sides that it has, as those with ill intent will be harder to find (but not impossible). In this the common quote attributed to Franklin applies well in my opinion: Those who sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither.
Proof of personhood: basically the difficult task of making sure that the other end of an internet connection has a real person, and together with that, proof that it is different than others, the ability to know you are you and not someone else.
This is incredibly interesting as a technical problem to be solved, and I do agree with you that the internet as we know it is at risk if we don’t solve it properly. It is specially hard to solve if you try to guarantee anonimity (like I believe it should be).
The wikipedia has an article about it that I think gives a good idea about the topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_of_personhood
Personally I have been quite carefully interested into the whole World ID solution, using a device called orb with open specifications that captures some data from your iris that should be unique per person, storing only an encrypted piece of information in a blockchain and on your device locally so that you can use it to identify yourself as a real unique person and only once, but wherever you use it, cannot know anything about you except that. There’s a lot of possible criticism to such a system, but insofar as I have checked and can understand, it seems like a legit solution. But I leave here the link for anyone interested enough to check it themselves: https://world.org/world-id
There’s 2 different things here:
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.
As a queer person I’m being very careful about what I say in various spaces right now given the current context. Thinking about replacing accounts that are more tied to me and making some.
Also thinking to use local LLMs to rephrase what I post so writing pattern detection won’t work.
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.
Why look to a (oversized) stick to deal with behavior by some people that may be brought on by lack of responsibility? Consider carrots: rewards for good behavior.
The internet is probably not worth losing privacy, which protects your freedom, anyway.
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.
And they will spy on us, at some point, if this were to be allowed to pass. Not a question of “if” the government will abuse it, but “which” government will abuse it.
Do we allow private enterprise total control over social media who then use their control to flood society with their propaganda use their power to blackmail, control, bully or worse.
OR
Do we allow government agencies total control over social media who then use their control to flood society with their propaganda use their power to blackmail, control, bully or worse.
At least with the publicly controlled government option, we would all have some measure of control or regulation. It would take a lot more organization and complication for bad actors to manipulate the message because they first have to take control of government.
Leaving control of social media in private hands means we’ve already given up control because bad actors can just buy whatever message they want and push it to everyone. Their message and manipulation guides everyone to the government they want. Bad actors win because they have control of social media and can win control of government.
The game is already set. We want to argue that the government shouldn’t have control of these things because we don’t/won’t/can’t trust government … but we are more than willing to put our trust in private for profit corporations.