Comment by ivan_gammel
8 days ago
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.
>And even then, it doesn't stop harassment and bullying. We already know this from facebook, where people's IDs are known.
It depends on your privacy settings. If people you don't know can comment on your posts, then they're not really verified (ie, you never accepted a friend request from them). In FB communities limited only to friends, I suspect there is much less bullying or harassment. But that kind of community is hard to create on FB, by design.
>So having known actors makes very little difference to misinformations gumming up our information markets.
If a verified actor can be permanently banned from a platform, then of course that will reduce misinformation on that platform by systematically excluding the originators. That includes people who routinely spread misinformation they receive off-platform.
Much less bullying is a matter of degrees. It implcitly acknowledges that harassment occurs without anonymiity.
>If a verified actor can be permanently banned from a platform, then of course that will reduce misinformation on that platform by systematically excluding the originators.
Eh. Yes, in a simplified producer/consumer model of this. I'm personally all for removing people who are not engaging in good faith.
Thing is that misinformation is now firmly linked to political power.
Compared to facts? Misinfo is faster and cheaper to produce, yet perfectly suited to maximize engage amongst the target audience. A key moment in that process, is when a fringe narrative is picked up by a key player in the media ecosystem.
Removing such a node, is to take up arms against the political forces using misinformation to fuel their narratives.
Not saying it shouldn't be done if it can. Just that we need a better set of understandings and tools before we can make this case.
As long as misinformation is produced by a real person, it is ok to have it. It is not a job of platforms to combat misinformation. If this becomes a real problem, then politicians aren’t working hard enough and need to be replaced. German political mainstream was too lazy, now we have AfD in double digits challenging the first place on elections. Time to replace that mainstream. Democrats and old-school Republicans in America were too ignorant and lazy, now America has Trump and needs a full reboot to avoid sliding into irrelevance. This is how things always worked historically.