The End of Online Anonymity (2019)

December 15th, 1791. As explained by SCOTUS as recently as 1995 (McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Commission) anonymous speech is baked into the first amendment, putting it at the core of american freedoms:

"Anonymity is a shield from the tyranny of the majority. . . . It thus exemplifies the purpose behind the Bill of Rights and of the First Amendment in particular: to protect unpopular individuals from retaliation . . . at the hand of an intolerant society." (Cut from EFF.)

However, the necessary condition for all these kinds of total social surveillance controls is a network of authorities who have physical impunity from the people they ostensiby serve, govern, or rule, and I'd bet this decade will be defined by resolving that question of how far are they willing to go. We're already post-truth in public and political discourse, so there is no basis for mutual trust, and the real world conventions about basic freedoms have been largely recast as privileges, as though they are both somehow granted by critics and subject to their political schemes. Some very clever people are still trying to find alternatives to a civil confrontation that seems both catastrophic and inevitable, and they're doing it in the form of growing new platforms, cryptocurrencies, privacy and security technologies, energy storage and efficiency techs, even vulnerability research as a hedge, but what I can only now call the leviathanists are co-ordinating to bar any and all exits for people, and in particular minds, that would generate any value they cannot subdue and spend themselves.

Indeed, meaningful anonymity is just probably just about done online, but what I don't think authorities understand is that they think people misbehave when they are anonymous. The trouble is, what they may be about to discover is that it was the anonymity that was the civility, and what is left without it is something altogether more serious.

> We are moving towards a model where the internet is dominated by a few centralized content providers and their walled gardens, and generated content may unfortunately make it even harder for grassroots online communities to survive and grow.

The author makes a good and fair analysis of the situation, yet I don't see how advocating for e-IDs is going to make the Internet a better place. This is a very ‘platform-focused’ critique that assume that the Internet tends toward more centralisation, where communities are packed together in massive platforms that regulate who communicates to whom and how.

Where do we see a need to regulate ‘fake news’ and artificially generated content? Facebook Pages? Twitter? Youtube? These are all hyper-global platforms focused on content monetization. On the other hand, local Facebook groups and the feed of your friends, Github repositories, Mastodon… may not face the same future. Maybe there's a lesson to learn here?

If every poster were required to have a government ID attached to their online presence I worry that many of the people who need access to online communities the most would be unable to participate in them. I don't know what the solution would be of course, but I'm tempted to pitch the idea of a "trust worthiness" score attached to users that functions somewhat like karma. Of course currently there's no practical and certainly no bias-free way to evaluate the massive amount of information being posted daily. There's also no way to guarantee that the majority of people would trust such a system nor that they are willing to verify any of the information they consume and readily spread.

Something along the lines of a network of pseudonym issuing authorities, which allow two things:

Individuals can generate pseudonyms and use them to act online to their heart's content.

However some kind of nuanced "reputation" is propagated back through the network and is "sticky" to the entity behind their pseudonyms.

As reputation is relative, the evaluation needs to be relative to the crowd you interact with. And the big big challenge is to protect the real life individual, so the pseudonym can only ever be uncloaked by the individual themselves.

Is that possible at all? Where are the communities researching about this?

Crap, now my own comment is starting to look like a bot to me.

This may be a testament to the very low bar set by internet forum/social media discussion, maybe we humans all write uninspired generic word salad comments all the time.

No we need crypto-signed anonymous identifiers that establish a reputation over time. Weakness of online reputation is the problem, not the bots or spam.

Is that uninhabitable in the sense "nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded"? Why would people make bots to post online comment threads, if not to attract real people? And why would real people go there if it wasn't interesting or enjoyable or clickbait rage-engaging?

And why would Governments be interested in stopping you engaging with bots, anymore than they stop you engaging with fiction books or fiction TV or playing video games against computer characters, etc?

The author says fake content is going to be too hard to identify so there is only one effective way to stop it, and that is to verify that everyone who posts content is in fact human. And that least to the end of anonymity.

" Ultimately, one possibility is that online platforms will begin requiring a verified government ID in order to register. We could even end up living in a world where a kind of “e-passport”, crypto-signed government ID is attached to your every internet connection, and tracked everywhere online."

Comparisons to OpenGPG are likely to make anyone cringe, but if you're willing to suspend disbelief about the usability issues, it seems like such an apt metaphor. Where signing a key is vouching for the owner's humanity, not their identity. I can imagine websites integrating my browser to attach a "humanity key" to the content I post, and my browser maintaining my collection of keys and my preferences for divulging them.

Granted, pseudonymity is not the same as anonymity. Maybe if the meaning (and lifespan?) behind these keys was constrained, then they could be sufficiently disposable to approximate anonymity.

This system is either fundamentally flawed or already implemented, but I don't know how determine which. Can anyone here share writing along these lines?

Rather than a blanket ban on anonymous accounts, how about read only until you verify ID? Or perhaps some way to tar pitting posts based on the degree of authentication of the account?

This way you can retain anonymity on sign up, but incentivise celebrity by increasing reach