Comment by malandrew
5 years ago
> IMO, there's a multibillion dollar company waiting to be founded to provide authenticity verification services for humans online.
Ironically accounts with Twitter's blue check mark are often the accounts most likely to be managed by a social media manager.
Blue check accounts are expensive enough that, if you get the account banned, you can't easily make a new one. Bot accounts don't have this problem. If I want to trick as many people as possible into drinking bleach, I probably want easily-burnable bot accounts, so that when someone calls me out on it, I can just make a new one and pick up where I left off.
Of course, this also assists in Social Cooling, since controversial statements act a lot like totally false ones in the public eye.
China already has that. At age 16, all citizens must get an ID card. Photo and biometric info are recorded. To get a cell phone, the ID card is required, and as of last year, it's cross-checked by a face recognition scan. Cell phone IDs are tied to citizen IDs. WeChat accounts are verified against phone IDs.
Now that's authenticity verification.
Not that different in the EU. Most member states keep track of EU citizens from birth with a citizen ID. To get a phone, you need to show said ID. There are states which keep biometrics in the ID and passports, such as face biometrics and fingerprints. Some EU states even sample DNA from the child at time of birth and keep in their records for future use.