Social media has mostly divided and isolated us. Twitter and some other platforms have been useful communications channels during unrest. But there could be other forms of communication just for that, since it’s all owned by billionaires now anyway, we need to stop imagining them as reliable tools.
Comment on Half of the US Now Requires You to Upload Your ID or Scan Your Face to Watch Porn
EndlessNightmare@reddthat.com 3 weeks ago
The end game here is to require ID for social media in order to suppress dissent. This is an easy first step due to the longstanding controversy surrounding pornography.
It’s all about control.
BanMe@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
sunbeam60@feddit.uk 3 weeks ago
I hope to Darwin social media ends up requiring ID. I believe it would do wonders for democratic discourse. It was only last week, a number of large US right-wing accounts were revealed to be driven from outside the US. Is it healthy for democracies that so many people pay heed to foreign actors?
If you write an op-ed for a newspaper, the newspaper need to identify you as there is an editor who is responsible for what gets written in the paper. This ensures there’s someone who can stand to account for any libellous statements.
With social media we immediately reneged on this and allowed them to wash their hands; “we are just a channel” is a pretty bleak statement to make when the discourse on social media destroys the lives of minorities, encourages suicide, undermines our democracy with AI and troll farm bots.
And we can do this is a privacy preserving way - of course the social media companies feeds the opposite narrative because they don’t want to implicated in the piles of shit they shovel on top of our democracy.
If social media was required to ensure they could tie an account to a real person, which they needn’t reveal unless forced to by a court order, we would know that we were engaging with a real opinion, not something coughed up by a Putin-run AI bot or a Chinese troll farm.
The system required isn’t that complex.
A social media
- a social media company is opening a new account.
- it sends the person opening the account to any of the multitude of ways we can already verify identity online.
- the person is identified and issued an identity token, which gets sent to the social media company.
- the social media company says “great, this person is real and we can, if required by a court order, work with the identity company to reveal who this person is is”. Right now, all the social media company has is a token.
- the account is opened.
In a system likes this, the identity company doesn’t know who the person is; that sits with the social media company.
Nor does the identity service know which account is actually posting for this real person, all they know is they verified someone as part of an account opening process.
Social media should be treated like the press - make them accountable for what gets posted and allow them to place this accountability on a real person by labelling posts “op-eds” if, and only if, they know who is doing the posting.
We are letting large, anonymous money-men ruin our democracy behind the veil of “free discourse”. It’s not free to the many people who gets harmed by it.
hark@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I’m not going to give up my privacy over your fear of foreign bogeymen.
EndlessNightmare@reddthat.com 3 weeks ago
It’s all fun and games until the government decides that it really doesn’t like dissenting opinions. We’ve already seen serious erosion of 1A rights in the U.S.
It would be one thing to have this in a world with benevolent leadership. But that isn’t the world we are living in.
DarrinBrunner@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
It would be one thing to have this in a world with benevolent leadership. But that isn’t the world we are living in.
So, Fantasyland, then. The closest anyone gets to benevolent leadership is their own parents, and that’s only maybe 50-50.
OctopusNemeses@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Bogeymen are imaginary. Political troll farms are real.
hark@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
They certainly are real, but their machinations are misunderstood. They often consist of people in poor countries looking to make a buck. Follow the money. You’ll find that even if you were to build a great firewall for your country of residence, troll farms will still reach you, and that domestic astroturf ain’t any greener than foreign astroturf.
qyron@sopuli.xyz 2 weeks ago
That’s the point.
You, as a common citizen, should not have to. But the moment you feel like to share your thought or opinion, you should be identifiable and made responsible for it.
The current social media outlets shield behind the argument they act solely as channels while at the same time fostering and allowing for “anonymous” groups or individuals to spout whatever views they want, often views that deter from advancing social and civilizational progress. Hence the current state of the world, with authoritarianism on a rise and hight like there wasn’t in nearly 70 years.
When the internet was made of individual websites, the person behind it was automatically made responsible for whatever they put on it. That was fair and reasonable.
Pushes like this, is assigning suspition/guilt before any wrong doing.
I will grant the overall facilitated acess to pornography is damaging the kids. There are already enough studies showing how the early access to porn is related to bad interpersonal relations on social, emotional and sexual level.
But this does not imply you should be identifying yourself to access adult content or anything on the web. Just impose curation. If it’s available to the public, you’re responsible for it.
Old school “dirty” books and magazines stores had controlled access and the really hardcore stuff was well out of reach of who should not get to it. Free porn is nice but there are things available that should be behind pay walls or at least registry, with identity verification.
hark@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
If your point is to stifle dissent, then sure. Whoever controls the narrative will make contradiction look unacceptable. If your name is tied to an opinion that may be construed as contrary to the dominant narrative, you will hesitate to post it, and if you do post it, then you will be taken down with very real consequences because of that tie to your real identity. Employers already look at social media to determine if your behavior is considered acceptable to them, even if you keep your professional life completely separate. Your proposal only destroys free speech further by making it worth less and less the cost of expressing.
Make no mistake, the excuse of protecting children from pornography is just that, an excuse, to restrict freedom of speech by putting into place the mechanisms to identify people and strike at them for daring to express their opinions. Pornography being in the form of books, magazines, tapes, DVDs, whatever physical media did not necessarily control access. There are many with stories of how they managed to gain access as children, either through a parent’s collection or otherwise. Similarly, this internet ID bullshit can be defeated, but it’ll be backed by stricter and stricter legislation to make defeating it illegal and they won’t be prosecuting children or the companies providing the ID verification service, they’ll be prosecuting adults using tools to defeat these mechanisms to express their opinions.
M1ch431@slrpnk.net 2 weeks ago
I am not doxxing myself so you can be paranoid. What’s next? Suspecting (e.g.) US citizens for being foreign agents and then sicking the FBI on them?
sunbeam60@feddit.uk 2 weeks ago
Fortunately I live in a country where the government can (broadly) be trusted.
WhatGodIsMadeOf@feddit.org 2 weeks ago
The end game is id for everything including spending money.
Isn’t this all part of project 2025?
The goal is get tokenized everything attached to an id so that everything you do is tracked to that id.
Thats why government is getting involved with crypto and they want land purchases and material purchases (gold, silver etc) to be tokenized like crypto so that all of a person’s life is digitized and trackable.
EndlessNightmare@reddthat.com 2 weeks ago
We are nothing but cattle to them.
It’s also why they get upset about the declining fertility rates and when people choose not to reproduce.
aeternum@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 weeks ago
in 7 days, that’s what australia will have.