> When I use FB or whatever, I want to be completely anonymous.
Keep in mind it's already against the FB terms of service to use it anonymously. You're supposed to use your real full name.
> With requiring payment comes the ability to trace where the money came from.
One possible solution could be bitcoin. I'd be more worried about where the money is going, though. Do modern democracies need to be collecting even more money from us, to do god knows what with? Would this new tax come with a decrease in other taxes? Probably not.
I think disincentivizing social media is a good idea, but a social media tax isn't the right move. Brainstorming some other ways of doing so:
- Ban certain social media Skinner-box features like endless scrolling, recommendation algorithms, likes, whatever. This is more likely to get to the heart of the problem, but gives the government more control over the internet, private businesses, etc.
- Create alternative social media platforms which don't use the same rage-inducing and addicting mechanisms. These will fail because they are by definition less addicting than the alternative.
- Make current social media unusable by flooding it with spam. This could be accomplished "extra-legally", preferably using AI to make spam hard to detect. This is already being done to an extent by bad actors (Chinese Communist Party, though you don't need AI when you have over a billion cheap workers), but could be done on a larger scale not to sway opinion, but to ruin the platforms altogether.
- Social media companies could use semantic analysis to downrank rage-bait and negativity and up-rank positivity and thoughtful discourse (though hopefully not that hollow "you go girl!!!" faux-positivity you sometimes see on social media). This is uncomfortable because it means social media companies get to engineer our conversations to be whatever they want, but they are already doing this, they're just doing it in a malevolent way.
- Somehow educate the entire population on the dangers of social media the same way we did with cigarettes. Whether through a public information campaign, or by generally getting people to meditate and realize the true important things in life. This is a terrible solution, and obviously social media companies would fight it tooth and nail, but I only mention it because I've heard it seriously proposed too many times. If your solution is "educate everybody", but everybody is currently hooked up to disinformation machines, you're screwed.
That's all I've got. Anyone else have any ideas?