Technology

Plenty of verified people provide disinformation and trolling. There's an entire American cable news channel dedicated to it. Several now, really.

The problem isn't that people spread disinformation, it's that people believe it without verifying. We need to increase peoples ability to utilize critical thinking skills, not somehow stem the unending tide of bullshittery.

There will always be snake oil salesman seeking to profit off the gullibility of the general public. The solution isn't to kill all the salesman, it's to teach people to be less gullible.

I'm only partly ok with it if it comes with anonymization of my identity. It should be possible to authenticate yourself without anybody knowing who you are or knowing that you authenticated. Maybe we could use an ID card scanner that generates some sort of code that can be used for anonymous identity validation.

We should also be a lot harder on social media companies that abuse our data. These companies should not be allowed to exist.

Even with verification the Internet will be full of misinformation.

Let's look at the recent 2024 Springfield pet-eating hoax. A woman, who I can lookup the name of, posted that she heard people in her neighborhood were eating cats and dogs. That misinformation quickly spread and was shouted at a US Presidential debate.

While the woman who originally posted it apologized, no one who spread that misinformation did.

While verification might help keep some people honest, it's likely only going to keep those already honest, honest.

I think there's a place for both. So long as none of it becomes mandatory, and online communities can freely choose to offer anonymous or verified identities, it's an idea worth trying.

Is my fetish fiction something bad that I have to take accountability for? No, it's harmless. Would I still post it attached to my real name? Never.

I agree. Not thought about it a lot, but there should be some way to use your ID for stuff like that without telling every service out there your full personal details.

A lot of the bad stuff that happens on the internet is directly related to perceived anonymity. If you want to bully, harass, make bigoted statements, disseminate propaganda, or shill for a corporation, it's better to be anonymous. If a country gives its citizens the right to free speech and reasonable protections for privacy, a non-anonymous internet is better. Besides, anonymity on the internet is an illusion for about 99% of internet users. All of the big social media companies know who you are - their whole business depends on the data they collect on you, and that data is worth much less if it can't be associated with an individual. They also have heavy incentives to share that information with the government. Try making an 'anonymous' threat against your country's leader and see if any law-enforcement types decide to visit you.

I tend to agree. Admittedly without having thought too deeply about how it would work, I kinda think there needs to be 2 internets: one that is anonymous and one that isn't. The anonymous one is vital for people to be able to freely dissent from and protest their government, etc. The non-anonymous one would be, as you said, something that can assess responsibility back to specific people. Idk. I'm just spit balling. Fascism, through unchecked capitalism, is killing the Internet. 🫤

That sounds like a good idea for a lemmy instance.

There's two points of consideration here, let's see if I can make my point without a wall of text, I'm prone to those...

1. Anonimity: the fact that where you connect cannot know who exactly you are. This should be straightforward, anonimity should not be taken away, it is a core part of the internet in my opinion. It's extremely important that we can express ourselves freely without fear of being persecuted. Despite the negative sides that it has, as those with ill intent will be harder to find (but not impossible). In this the common quote attributed to Franklin applies well in my opinion: Those who sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither.

2. Proof of personhood: basically the difficult task of making sure that the other end of an internet connection has a real person, and together with that, proof that it is different than others, the ability to know you are you and not someone else.

This is incredibly interesting as a technical problem to be solved, and I do agree with you that the internet as we know it is at risk if we don't solve it properly. It is specially hard to solve if you try to guarantee anonimity (like I believe it should be).

The wikipedia has an article about it that I think gives a good idea about the topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_of_personhood

Personally I have been quite carefully interested into the whole World ID solution, using a device called orb with open specifications that captures some data from your iris that should be unique per person, storing only an encrypted piece of information in a blockchain and on your device locally so that you can use it to identify yourself as a real unique person and only once, but wherever you use it, cannot know anything about you except that. There's a lot of possible criticism to such a system, but insofar as I have checked and can understand, it seems like a legit solution. But I leave here the link for anyone interested enough to check it themselves: https://world.org/world-id

Except this is not about ending anonymity in favor of John Buddy Smith, ID 1234-567890, this is about pseudonymity using cryptographic identities.

And also, as you might have noticed, platforms are fine with their own bots or bots they've been paid to allow in.

Which means that for any kind of real verification you need a transparent system, communities allowing or not allowing something are not enough, any such authority is a point of failure. Transparent like e-mail or e-news, except one can do better now.

Why look to a (oversized) stick to deal with behavior by some people that may be brought on by lack of responsibility? Consider carrots: rewards for good behavior.

The internet is probably not worth losing privacy, which protects your freedom, anyway.

So you offer abolishing privacy to abolishing privacy? No, it will be like in fascist Russia or fascist China. P.S. It sounds like some utopia like communism, socialism, anarchism and similar BS lol

@troyunrau I agree. One reason social media is so toxic is the use of “handles” and “pseudonyms” instead of real, verified names. People will say things to you online that they would not say to your face. If you have a privacy issue with using your real identity, then you can choose not to use the platform.

IRC and email isn't dead and they are completely anonymous. Web ain't gonna die. TCP and UDP ain't ever gonna die. HTTP ain't ever gonna die. HTML ain't ever gonna die. JSON isn't even part of the web but it de facto is now. At this rate JS ain't ever gonna die unfortunately. The web is safe. The internet is safe. Everything is open and it can't be taken away or killed.

Think of it like climate change. The internet is going to be just fine. Its whoever is trying to benefit from digital IDs that will go extinct on it, and the internet will have healed itself from them.

One way around this is to nationalize social media companies. Use public funding to run the service instead of private companies and run the service in the same way as licensing a vehicle to drive on the highway.

Social media has essentially become a public necessity that everyone wants and needs, it should be run and regulated like the public water system. It should be run, controlled, regulated and monitored by a system like the postal service where it isn't designed to make money but instead concentrate all is activity into just providing a critical independent service to everyone.