Comment by fyredge
3 days ago
Because of ID tracking? Say you have attach your government approved ID to use social media. It is now trivial to check how many accounts you have made and how much you have posted. You certainly can't be posting faster than the fastest typist in the world. And if you're mostly just copy pasting, is the quality of the posts actually worth engaging with?
While I am not against internet ID, there is a case to be made for social media for the harms they are causing.
It is now trivial to check how many posts many people in social media make with their own accounts, and astroturfing campaigns still happen.
Why would social media companies fight against this? They, much like the public actually like the engagement. That is the whole problem.
Look at X, where you can now see where people are posting from, do people honestly engage with the feature? No, they don't bother to check if they agree with the content and they use it as an excuse to dismiss in bad faith if they don't like the content.
This is not a control problem, social media networks are not at a loss of options in how to engage with this, they don't want to, the point can be made that states might want to fix this and are unable to, but if that was actually the case there's half a dozen better ways to do that, among them, banning the services.
The idea that the entirety of the population ought to throw privacy away so people can still browse Instagram is repugnant to me.
I think we're speaking past each other. I'm talking about the way a single user can create multiple accounts on a single platform to create the illusion of consensus. If you repeatedly see a single user creating many posts / comments on a single topic, it quickly satiates your attention.
With an approved ID, it will be trivial to enforce 1 ID 1 account on 1 platform. This is not possible now.
To my knowledge, no country has tried it before up until recently. The issue of government distrust is valid, but that shifts the problem to one of government accountability, not accessibility. Demand the rule of law to be upheld, hold those in power accountable and be vigilant of their trespasses, do not abdicate what little power you hold. That is what is required for civil society to function properly.
Let's say the government issues hundreds of thousands of IDs to people who don't exist and uses them to verify bots (or room full of paid humans) that post pro-government messages all day, at "normal" rates that a human posts.
It's amazing how there is a much larger crowd, of completely real people, who approve of the government, than those nasty dissenters. We know they're real people because we trust the government vouching for its own IDs.
And because of the real ID policy, the government can also ask the social media company for the ID used by opposed posters, and find out where they live and "visit" them, maybe "warn" them.
Hooray for democracy!
This sounds like an unreasonable amount of distrust in a government. If a government is truly malicious, it no longer matters if an ID was issued in the first place.
Take the current US administration. If they were to point the finger at a user for something the government didn't like, I doubt many people will agree, and more likely people will be opposed to the government than the user. The most important thing is to prevent government from abusing violence on the people for speaking up, which is somewhat lacking in the US.
More effort should be done to hold governments accountable, not finding ways to skirt around it.
It doesn't even have to be malicious. The UK government had the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windrush_scandal where it lost the only identity documents of thousands of people, and also tried to remove them from the UK for not having these documents.
Governments shouldn't work like Google's technical support, where they are in 100% control and you have zero recourse if they don't like you, or even if they just fuck up. Governments should be accountable to their people, there need to be systems (like courts) to rein in the government's unlawful actions. It goes without saying that government shouldn't build fully centralised systems of authority, and certainly shouldn't be implicitly trusted by third parties - because when they do that, things go badly for the citizens of that government. Or citizens of other countries (see e.g. the USA fucking with ICC staff)
...and yet here we are, discussing systems that would lock people out of all sorts of things if they won't or can't get a trusted proof they're in a central database we trust the custodians of 100% - those custodians never make mistakes or abuse their position, right? Why the rush to adopt the more fragile system?
What I worry about is more and more "nudge theory" or dark patterns coming in; you may be entitled to something, or have rights, and the government doesn't like people having that, or paying for people to have it. They won't say "no, people can't have these rights and entitlements" and take the hit at the ballot box (though sometime they do and that is strictly worse), but they will deliberately put in roadblocks and gotchas (digital or otherwise) that oh-so-unfortunately sometimes don't work, or are cumbersome and thus discourage people from exercising their rights.
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