Ask HN: Why not fight social media trolls and propaganda with country flags?
Social media today allows anyone from any country to pose as anyone else. And yet in many cases the social media sites themselves can easily determine which country a poster is from.
By default, everyone posting online has an IP address that reveals their country with reasonable accuracy. So why not reveal the country of each poster on all social media sites?
Every social media submission/comment could have a country flag next to it.
I've noticed that on /r/europe, where country flags are used, it has a subtle but profound effect on how I interpret comments.
For example: https://old.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/jiareq/happy_national_day_austria/
I'm very aware that it's possible to proxy traffic. But it's also well within the big tech companies power to make this increasingly difficult. And those nationalistic trolls, which are not state-actors, would not have the know-how to mask their IPs in the first place. Identifying users with cloud provider IPs and VPNs is reasonably straightforward.
This is also not a ban of any kind and wouldn't prevent anonymous users on TOR. It would just flag them as "Unknown" or something, which would still be useful info for the reader.
The only potential downside that I can see is the risk of actually increasing the impact of the bad actors, if the anti-proxying effort is not effective enough. But this seems like just a simple matter of doing the work that should already be done.
So, assuming effective anti-proxying is done by the big social media sites, why shouldn't we have country flags everywhere?