Comment by vannevar
8 days ago
Yes, I think we'll see the rise of id-verified online communities. As long as all the other members of the community are also id-verified, the risk of abuse (bullying, doxing, etc) is minimized. This wouldn't stop someone from posting AI-generated content, but it would tend to suppress misinformation and spam, which arguably is the real issue. Would people complain about AI-generated content that is genuinely informative or thought-provoking?
Verification does not stop harassment or bullying.
It will not stop misinformation either.
Verification is expensive and hard, and currently completely spoof-able. How will a Reddit community verify an ID? In person?
If Reddit itself verifies IDs, then nations across the world will start asking for those IDs and Reddit will have to furnish them.
The key is „decentralized“ and „chain of trust“. An ID provider does actual identification in person first, maybe collects some biometrics. An online community trusts the ID provider and just asks the necessary questions. A foreign government may force this online community to provide only the data it owns, i.e. the flag „true“ in „verification_completed“ column of the database, maybe an uuid of the person at the ID provider. How does it protect from harassment and bullying? It provides means to address them legally, because court will be able to get real identity of the criminal and the platform can just ban the real person for life, no new registrations and nicknames. Initially this may result in a surge of moderation requests, but eventually it will become less and less as people learn the new rules.
As for misinformation, as long as all actors are known and are real people, they should be allowed to speak. It’s not good to be a flood of fakes.
Digital IDs are always spoofable, and frankly it seems the only option now is to go for something like meeting someone in the physical world to verify who they are. This is the realm of banks and organizations that can coordinate that much manpower.
And even then, it doesn't stop harassment and bullying. We already know this from facebook, where people's IDs are known. Going for legal redress requires court time and resources to fight the case.
The core of the misinformation doom loop, is when popular misinformation narrative is picked up and amplified by well known personalities. This is crucial in making it a harmful force in our politics.
So having known actors makes very little difference to misinformations gumming up our information markets.
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>Verification does not stop harassment or bullying.
>It will not stop misinformation either.
I'm open to any evidence that either statement is true. The rational argument that verification will reduce harrassment, bullying, and misinformation is that the verified perpetrator can be permanently banished from the community for anti-social behavior, whereas an anonymous perpetrator can simply create a new account.
Do you have a rational counter-argument?
>If Reddit itself verifies IDs, then nations across the world will start asking for those IDs and Reddit will have to furnish them.
Every community will have to decide whether the benefits of anonymity outweigh the risks. On the whole, I think anonymity has been a net negative for online community, but I understand that others may disagree. They'll still be free to join anonymous communities. But I suspect that large-scale, verified communities will ultimately be the norm, because for everyday use people will prefer them. Obviously, they work better in countries with healthy, functional liberal democracies.
>Verification does not stop harassment or bullying.
I can say this from experience moderating, as well as research. I'll take the easy case of real world bullying first - people know their bullies here. It does not stop bullying. Attackers tend to target groups/individuals that cannot fight back.
Now you asked for evidence that either statement was true, but then spoke about reducing harassment. These are not the same things. This 2013 paper studied incivility in anonymous and non-anoymous forums [1] . Incivility was lower in the case where identities were exposed, however this did not stop incivility.
The Australian ESafety commisioner has this to say as well: > owever, it is important to note that preventing or limiting anonymity and identity shielding online would not put a stop to all online abuse, and that online abuse and hate speech are not always committed by anonymous or fake account holders. [2]
Now to bring GenAI into the mix - the cost of spoofing a selfie has now gone down quite a bit, if not made it very cheap. Verification of ID will require being able to manually inspect an individual. This means the costs of verification are VERY labor intensive. India has a biometric ID program, and we are talking about efforts on those scales. And even then, it doesn't stop false IDs from being created.
Combining these various points, ditching anonymity would necessitate a large effort in verifying all users, killing off the ability for people to connect on anonymous forums (LGBTQ communities for example) for some reduction in harassment.
This also assumes that people rigorously check your ID when its being used, becuase if there is any gap or loophole, it will be used to create fake IDs to spam, harass or target people.
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/263729295_Virtuous_...
[2] https://www.esafety.gov.au/industry/tech-trends-and-challeng...
> On the whole, I think anonymity has been a net negative for online community, but I understand that others may disagree.
I would like to agree with you, but having moderated content myself - people do not give a shit and will say whatever they want, because they damned well want you to know it.
Take misinformation; I used to think the volume of misinformation was the issue. It turns out that misinformation amplificaiton is more driven by partisan or momentar political needs, than our improved ability to churn out quantities of it.
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