Authoritarianism continues to grow around the world…
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.
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!
Is my fetish fiction something bad that I have to take accountability for? No, it’s harmless. Would I still post it attached to my real name? Never.
What would you have done before the internet?
I haven’t lived before Internet was a big thing, so I don’t know just how likely it would be to have it published. Maybe would’ve sent it to an appropriate small magazine - under a pseudonym, of course.
So you offer abolishing privacy to abolishing privacy? No, we don’t want it like it is in fascist Russia or fascist China. P.S. It sounds like some utopia like communism, socialism, anarchism and similar BS lol
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.
IRC and email isn’t dead and they are completely anonymous. Web ain’t gonna die. TCP and UDP ain’t ever gonna die. HTTP ain’t ever gonna die. HTML ain’t ever gonna die. JSON isn’t even part of the web but it de facto is now. At this rate JS ain’t ever gonna die unfortunately. The web is safe. The internet is safe. Everything is open and it can’t be taken away or killed.
Think of it like climate change. The internet is going to be just fine. Its whoever is trying to benefit from digital IDs that will go extinct on it, and the internet will have healed itself from them.
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.
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.
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…
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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.
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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
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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.
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.
Assuming the company running the service and doing the verification is acting in good faith (big leap here, I get it) couldn’t you verify an identity, store a piece of static information about that person (DL, SSN even tho that sucks) in a hash so that no one else could use that identity to create an account and then issue an account ID with no link to identity marker?
This would allow you to verify users, prevent people from using an ID that was already used, prevent you from being able to link an account to an identity, and prevent you from being able to easily return a list of everyone identified on the service. Best you could do is respond to an individual query on whether that person has verified with your service.
I think it could work technically, but I agree that in practice the US would use its power to make you conduct surveillance without alerting customers, or maybe enact some KYC type requirements for internet usage. This would likely be a first or skipped step on the way to that.
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.
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.
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.
That sounds like a good idea for a lemmy instance.
Would likely only work if federated only with other Lemmy instances with the same requirements, but yeah, I could imagine something like that evolving.
i mean, soon there will be instance private subs, so you can be federated but still have verified-only spaces.
bans would be quite effective, too
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.
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. 🫤
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.
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.
If that ever comes to pass I just would not use the sites.
If that’s the case for everyone, I fully approve of this. People need to stop using social media.
Exactly. I’m almost there with YouTube if I don’t find solution to this:
Have you tried freetube on desktop and there is newpipe on android
I did. Doesn’t work.
Ah my bad sorry. It was working the last time I tried it. I have had luck with brave browser too without an account and it blocks the ads
Nope. Just tried on Brave and it doesn’t work either.
Thanks nevertheless.
Try Grayjay. There’s an option on their YpuTube plugin to allow age-restricted videos. Just try the mobile app for now, though, their desktop version is still in alpha phase.
Nope. I’m logged in, age restricted videos and controversial ones enabled but still…
Fuck that guy.
