The problem of social manipulation via bots isn’t limited to intelligence operations, though I would argue that this is the most immediate danger.

We’re also seeing a huge spike in advertising bots pretending to be normal users just to push goods and services.

Because of these motives social media has become less about bringing people together and more about extracting information from people in order to more efficiently manipulate them.

It’s causing social media to become actively dangerous to society in general. Ensuring that everyone is a human is an essential first step for having ethical online social interactions.

Just look at the difference in conversations on Lemmy vs Reddit. Sure, there are some assholes here and there but it’s largely a calm place where you can have an actual conversation.

This is how online discourse used to be from the early BBS days right up until Facebook and algorithmically curated feeds discovered that fear, outrage and anger are the best drivers of engagement.

Now, in addition to the platform’s manipulation (which is largely commercially motivated) we have LLMs which let anybody with funding create massive armies of fake people who can dynamically insert themselves into conversations in order to push any messaging you can imagine.

It’s a bad situation that needs an immediate solution. I just don’t like that the solution has been decided on, in secret, by western democracies and is being forcefully implemented in a manner that also allows intelligence/law enforcement a backdoor into everything. (A digital ID also makes it very easy to view every users complete Internet history because that data is tagged with the users actual identity).