Comment by bbarnett
7 days ago
The elephant in the room, is 'foreign actor'.
All of our platforms are inundated by an overwhelming amount of well crafted, targeted (specific per person) campaigns of disinformation by foreign actors.
China, Russia, Iran, and others cannot even remotely hope to stand against the West. Yet if you cannot stand against your adversary, you must weaken them.
You promote infighting. You take minor issues which can be cooperatively resolved with compromise, and seek to turn them into issues of great division. You spread falsehoods, creating useful idiots in great numbers.
You find the most radicalized, most loony of citizens that you can, and then secretly fund them.
Understand, any concept of "we do that to ourselves" is like a gnat in comparison. This is a real threat, it's been getting worse, and the common person is not capable of even understanding the concept. The common person, even when told repeatedly, thinks there is no downside to having their Pii stolen, or hacked. They simply read click bait titles, youtube or tiktok videos and 100% believe every word without any skepticism.
You may disagree with any or all of the above.
However! The above is what is actually behind the move for KYC to this extent. It's not about age verification, it's about identity. And it's not even about one westerner talking to another, it's about a foreign adversary seeking to pretend to be a domestic.
Of course, this is all rife for abuse. Of course, there are immense downsides. Yet the downsides of leaving an endless stream of propaganda, disinformation spewed at everyone including our youth, unchecked, is far far greater.
And I say this as someone that has fought for an open internet. It's already dead. It's dead because foreign interests use it as a tool to destroy our societies. It's dead because soon AI will replace most generated information.
Age verification laws are really identity laws, and any work to provide anonymous verification will fail, sadly, unfortunately, because the perceived threat is so large.
(I do not even necessarily agree with this, but if we don't understand the logic and the why of this, of why it is happening, then we're complaining about the wrong thing...)
So if you don't give your ID to multiple corporations in league with foreign governments, then foreign governments win?
Even in that context, I believe you could provide semi-anonymous verification. You just need a weaker encryption of sorts. One you can crack in a month instead of never ever. Then have that shit rotate, and the government can invest money to find that one identity posting BS all day with multiple bots until it rotates/regenerates, but they can't keep track of everyone.
It's far simpler. All you need is KYC to generate anon tokens, and then make it illegal to store any linking information and illegal to use any such information in court.*
The issue is no one in government would buy into this. You'd prevent them from catching bozo criminals who can't use a VPN.
*For example, you get up to N anon tokens a day you can use for anoning online. Only a count is stored daily to limit generations.
The opposition in the West does not come from foreign propaganda but from sky-high house prices, sky-high education and health insurance costs and dropping living standards.
All of which is the fault of the establishment parties and not of foreign actors.
Even Trump now continues or, in the Middle East, exceeds the existing long term neocon policies. So the foreign online propaganda, which does exist, is completely overrated.
I mean, yes and. I'm sure that social media of all stripes is rife with funded propaganda. It's been proven several times. It helps them tremendously that to tear the United States and other western powers to shreds, all you have to do is point at the facts on the ground. Our governments are completely in the pocket of corporations and barely if at all represent any actual people's will, the only people's will they express interest in being directly traceable to various hate campaigns they themselves concoct (fucking with transpeople, fucking with sex workers, etc.) while the rest of the country has the copper pried out of the walls by these low-rent grifters.
I don't need China to tell me via Tiktok that my life is getting demonstrably worse. I know that. The fact that China gets to tell me and be completely honest whilst doing so isn't something they've "engineered," they're just pointing at reality.
Well the politicians could make that argument but haven't.
"We need our social media companies to verify everybody, says fmr. UN Ambassador Nikki Haley"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXqTMwN4MtY
At the time she was the Neocon Presidential candidate.
I've always found it difficult to believe that voters are capable of critically consuming information and voting for wars, regulations or confiscatory taxes, and simultaneously are incapable of thinking critically about propaganda. Under this model, the fact that some deceptive sources may be foreign is largely a red herring. The entire premise of Democracy rests upon the presumption that voters are capable of making informed decisions in an adversarial information landscape.
I don't see the desire to control Internet speech as a novel phenomenon. The rationalizations have evolved over the years. The proliferation of AI, Russian sponsored podcasters and Wumaos are iterations of an appeal to special circumstances.
If the West truly believes that authoritarians like the CCP are immoral and should be opposed, it stands to reason that they shouldn't be seeking to emulate the CCP's methods. That's the surface level, ideologically consistent view.
Beneath that, there is a rabbit hole of fringe theory. Like the above poster, I provide this information to better explain possible motives, without endorsement. In the conspiracy sphere, the PRC is regarded as a trial lab for social engineering schemes. The allegation is that concepts are ironed out there first. Examples would include: social credit scores, digital ID, Internet censorship and the confluence of all three. Whether these theories are true or false, it wouldn't be unreasonable to be wary of these outcomes.
I agree with much (if not necessarily all) of what you said, esp about foreign actors and adversarial propaganda and disinfo (APD.)
I worked on the latter problem space precisely for the US State Department. Its challenging, esp at scale, and esp if the folks trying to fight back are not given a free enough of a hand to do whats needed.
> Of course, this is all rife for abuse. Of course, there are immense downsides. Yet the downsides of leaving an endless stream of propaganda, disinformation spewed at everyone including our youth, unchecked, is far far greater.
Or we could, you know, trust people to exercise their critical faculties without the intervention of overbearing Civil Servants, Cabinet Office officials or the guiding hand of the BBC. Radical idea, I know.
We tried that, and it turns out you can't trust people to exercise their critical faculties. Haven't you been paying attention?
Ah right, yeah, because the Guardian-reading, PPE-educated, civil service "concerns have been raised" class that we trust to govern in our enlightened best interests have been doing such a fantastic job of things. My mistake.
Mass alienation didn’t begin in a troll farm in St. Petersburg, it began in think tanks, boardrooms, and editorial meetings that decided ordinary people were an obstacle to be nudged, not a public to be served.
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> Or we could, you know, trust people to exercise their critical faculties
That's not working so well in the US at least. That gave us Trump.
The failure of coastal Liberals to talk to anyone apart from themselves in successive elections gave you Trump.