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Comment by aphextron | Hacker News Reader

This whole problem could be solved by opening account verification up to everyone. Twitter would be amazing if every profile were guaranteed to be a verified human being with government issued ID. Leave it open to those who want to stay anonymous, but give users the option to filter those people out.

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I refuse to create accounts on site that require even a phone number, let alone government ID. It will eventually get lost and things like passports being faked can land you in prison or watchlists if someone like Israel decides to steal your identity while committing an extra-legal assassination.

That escalated quickly. Are you sure if Israel wanted to pin an extra-legal assassination on you, they couldn't do so already?

I don't think it's about them wanting to explicitly target someone, but about one's odds of being randomly implicated increasing with every leak.

Perfectly sane reason for not signing up with Twitter.

I want to downvote the person you replied to and upvote your comment. HN apparently doesn't work like that so I'll stick with a single upvote :)

Once you get enough karma you can downvote comments.

But the delay is specifically so you can internalise the fact that downvoting here is a stronger claim than on, say, reddit.

They could use Google Captcha and create two kind of verified account, you don't necessary need an ID.

CAPTCHA is an entirely pointless way of verifying humans, you can buy human-powered CAPTCHA solves for less than $1 per thousand.

Ah sorry then, I did not know it was that cheap :/

I upvoted because I assume you meant that verification would be optional. I believe Twitter is actually moving toward that solution.

I'd be on board. Anonymous users would stay anonymous; users that are comfortable confirming their identity would get a blue badge. I don't see a downside, and I see plenty of upsides.

I don't see this working well as long as Twitter us also using the badge as a means of punishment

I couldn't agree more. If there are more accounts than people in a region, you know you have robots registering. They need to employ better captcha and verification for registering new accounts.

I wouldn't go as far as to require government ID, (some folks have issues getting government IDs for voting purposes) and many undeveloped nations have large portions of their populations that have no birth certificates.

I would however require that a human be present to create a new account and that it be tied to a phone number for 2FA or something along these lines that makes mass registration cost prohibitive.

Suppose someone has divergent interests. Maybe they are interested in computing and hunting. If they want to discuss things and cultivate a following in each of these communities, should they be required to tweet both from the same account?

What if there isn't a lot demographic overlap? Twitter doesn't provide any kind of tooling that would allow one to follow only the relevant tweets in a given account. This is especially relevant if the interests/communities at issue not only don't have a lot in common, but actually spend a lot of time at odds, which is the case for many interests. It'd be impossible to have some followers from such groups who wanted to hear about the one thing without simultaneously alienating them by talking about the other thing. Computing and hunting are good examples because your average cypherpunk's opinion and worldview is much different from your average hunter's opinion and worldview.

I have personally started a handful of different Twitter accounts intended to engage with different communities. None of these perform any automatic activity at all and I basically use them for a couple of days and then give up because it's too much effort (recently, more because Twitter blocks the accounts almost-immediately).

More accounts than people is absolutely not a reliable indicator that "you have robots registering" (especially when businesses etc. are expected to register). That may be a better metric if Twitter provided useful filtration tools, but even then it'd be shoddy.

I don't think the scheme under discussion requires a one to one relationship between accounts and pieces of ID. Just that, to get the blue badge or whatever, any account should have an identified 'real person' (or company etc) behind it.

I think there should be two potential badges for twitter users: 1) Verified identity (as you described) 2) Suspected bot

And you should be able to filter out posts accordingly, like "only showed verified" or "don't show suspected bots".

And by default, Twitter should hide suspected bots in reply/hashtag threads, so they don't get increased exposure.

I like this idea, a simple tag on an account that says "we have verified this person is real" and a filtering mechanism in the UI would do wonders.

Human / not human is probably worthwhile, but a ton of twitters value would go away if everyone had to use their real identity to post.

Maybe something like Selfkey would be useful...

https://selfkey.org/

I could go for a service like that. Even without the anonymous option.

Facebook desperately needs this feature.

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