Comment by bdangubic
9 hours ago
this is the way…
I find absolutely ridiculous every social media / free speech discussion if platform does not have proof of identity. while you and I may have right to free speech the bots etc do not. hence, there is no free speech without proof of identity imo
I think anonymity is important for some kind of coordination problems (e.g. against an authoritarian government). A better solution is to have a nominal fee, maybe $10/yr to be platformed, that way it's expensive to bot.
this is solid but if I am China what is $400,000,000 to spend on 40,000,000 bots that now we think are real people…
That's about as much as United States Presidents spend on their campaigns, so it's actually quite a lot. Especially if it gets noticed and shut down.
Yeah I think anonymity is important to have available. But I wish not every single social media platform was trivial to bot.
(GP and I disagree on whether every platform should require it)
Well, the issue with coordination is you need everyone already there to coordinate. If people are only using the network for illegitimate uses, then it will get shut down (think 4chan, Silk Road). Really, it's in the authoritarian government's best interest (not the people's) to make multiple platforms. Most people will choose the free one, so it's 10–100x cheaper to either bot the pay-for-anonymity platform or shut it down when they notice it formenting unrest.
Of course there is free speech without proof of identity. The Supreme Court has ruled that the First Amendment protects anonymous speech. The right to speak anonymously is fundamental to the right to speak freely.
You haven't proven the identity of "bdangubic" to us yet here you are exercising your right to free speech.
You're misreading the argument.
They're not saying people do not have the freedom to speak anonymously, they're saying that computer programs, by virtue of not being a person, do not have freedom of speech under the Constitution.
Obviously you can argue that you have First Amendment protections to write programs that then speak for you, which is essentially where the argument should happen. I think a very reasonable concession is: you can write programs that speak for you, so long as they do not masquerade as another person (real or fake). I.e.: you can write a program that speaks as you, or you can write a program that speaks as a program.
what if I was an AI bot programmed under the direction of President Xi? :)
What if you were? One has to assume most of the "people" with whom one interacts on the internet are bots or AIs now, anyway. That's just the nature of our post-truth reality, it doesn't matter.
The point is that would have no bearing at all on whether or not you would have the right to free speech if you were a person who chose not to reveal your identity.
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