Comment by dd36 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dd36 | Hacker News Reader

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Agree. The big one you missed is identity. Most hate is anonymous. Being able to filter by tags like “known racist” or whatever, and seeing someone’s history of sharing misinformation is useful but most people would self-censor if their identity was known or other users would filter out those that won’t identify.

What I wonder is what Musk will do if he finds out the scales are artificially weighted towards conservative content. Like if conservative content is artificially boosted by bots and algorithms. Facebook was much more liberal before thumbs were put on the scale. I don’t remember when but I think it was Mother Jones that saw huge traffic movement changes after algo changes like a decade ago?

https://www.theverge.com/2020/10/17/21520634/facebook-report...

Like what if the natural state of humanity is much more liberal than the American media and social media allow for? Will Musk allow that or will he see anything that doesn’t align with his views as error or manipulation?

What if a truly free and transparent self-moderating platform naturally promotes leftism more than a moderated but manipulated feed does?

A study showed that people are more aggressive online when using their real name

> Results show that in the context of online firestorms, non-anonymous individuals are more aggressive compared to anonymous individuals. This effect is reinforced if selective incentives are present and if aggressors are intrinsically motivated.

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

Weird but I still think Elon’s idea of needing confirmed identity for a checkmark is solid. If anonymous users then are nicer than checkmarked users, I guess the filter will work in reverse? The elimination of bots will be nice if they can do it.

Requiring validated identity is anti free speech.

There's been so many words spilled online about how terrible of an idea it is to require confirmed identities for online.

Recently, see https://twitter.com/mmasnick/status/1576274615231401984 or more casually https://www.garbageday.email/p/oh-cool-were-talking-about-an...

> Generally, if your solution is virtually indistinguishable from one of the systems the Chines government is using to keep people in line, your solution is bad.

How do you know that requiring identity is anti free speech? Not everyone online is Iranian political dissident. Sure, some people claim that you can't have free speech when your identity is known but I don't see any solid reasoning behind it.

Mike Masnick in his tweets repeats some talking points but there's no cohesive argument.

And AFAIK an anonymous political dissident wouldn’t want a blue checkmark?

Furthermore, there can be layers of anonymity. There can be anonymous publicly but not to Twitter. That’s dangerous given that Twitter cannot protect your identity from a state actor accessing its internal systems. Thus, again, why would you want a checkmark as a dissident.

Again, not every speech revolves around political dissent.

Some does though.

So the fact that this applies to some people means that it is an issue for those people.

We can have special arrangements for special circumstances.

Requiring ID verification is adding limitations on who you permit to speak. It is inherently anti 'free speech'. I think it's fine if that's the sort of website you want to build (twitter at the moment is not a free speech maximalist), but don't pretend that doing this doesn't limit speech.

> Requiring ID verification is adding limitations on who you permit to speak

Do you mean that in countries where not everyone has government ID? That's not an issue, the government doesn't have to be the authority of ID. Besides, governments can create fake IDs for covert operations anyway. I don't suggest that everyone should connect to the internet with government issued ID card.

How do you verify someone's IRL identity without a government issued ID card in a scalable way?

I don't mean some idea that could work at some arbitrary point in the future (decentralized whatever...). If a social media platform were to do this, right now, how would they do it without verifying a government issued ID?

Identity doesn't come into existence with the registration with a government, it's something you build over time as you interact with the world around you.

Nicknames are an identity and it's pretty much common these days to have nicknamed account on all over the internet. The problem with these is that one can have multiple of those and a behaviour in one place doesn't transfer into other places.

So maybe we can have across-the-internet identities. You are jasonshaev but who you are on twitter? on reddit? on other places? Once you become the person who is known around everywhere the same way, you have the identity that you would like to protect. You can't troll one place when bored then be known as a nice person somewhere else. I think that's good enough identity. The implementation can be around crypto, single sign in, face recognition etc.

The thread started with "real name." The only way to verify that is government identity.

If you want to verify some other, "online" identity, that's fine, but I don't see how that would meaningfully affect anyones behavior. To be clear, I don't think verifying someone's real name will meaningfully improve online behavior either -- plenty of other threads explain why. In which case, what's the point of either?

I struggle with how else to phrase this - Adding restrictions inherently restricts people.

You never know where the prevailing winds of online sentiment will turn next. Having your every post tagged with your identity can lead to real-life problems in the future, even if it was something edgy you said as a teenager or something you used to believe but don't any longer.

> You never know where the prevailing winds of online sentiment will turn next. Having your every post tagged with your identity can lead to real-life problems in the future, even if it was something edgy you said as a teenager or something you used to believe but don't any longer.

So maybe, for every single thought one has, one ought not fly around the world and post it on a flyer on every street corner and light post. Which is basically what posting on Twitter is.

But then I think a ton of stuff people casually do online is batshit crazy when you put it in real-world terms. Of course you wouldn't do the above. You wouldn't even do it if you had a magic button that could make it happen for you without taking time & money to go do it in person. "Post my random toilet thought on hundreds of millions of surfaces all over the world? No, god, why would I do that?"

Would you give a teenager access to such a magic button? Of course not. That would be entirely insane. Even if using the button would not, per se, get them in trouble, you'd destroy that thing or put it in a safe. Handing it over to them to do with as they please wouldn't even be something you'd consider doing.

But we live in a world where ~every developed-world kid has a button like that by age 12, and sometimes much earlier. WT actual F. Of course it's causing tons of problems. Most adults couldn't be trusted to make good choices with such a tool (clearly).

That’s an opinion. I disagree with it. It’s a private corporation not the government.

You either have people incentivized to self-identify with a checkmark or what? The alternative is to build an AI that identifies you in order to remove bots? I don’t even think that’s possible without it auto removing everyone that uses anonymizing tools like Tor?

You already require confirmed identity to receive a Twitter blue checkmark. So that wouldn't be a new change.

Wouldn't self censor solve the problems just as well as deleting content?

See, because we don't say everything that comes to our mind, we are able to interact in a civil manner with people that can have any kind of opinions. In real life, I'm sometimes shocked that someone is a total bigot.

However, when civility is established we can discuss these ideas too and instead of having these people being toxic these ideas can be expressed in a civil manner and discussed. Maybe they have a point sometimes? If they do, it can be dully noted and if they don't they will be exposed to the counter arguments. Also, when ideas are expressed in civil manners, people don't label other people straight as "bigot", "racists" and accept the nuances. In fact, some prominent right-wing people are doing that, people like Jordan Peterson. Because the guy is civil, he is effective and it's up to the rest to contradict his claims in civil manners.

So yes, it is alright to have some self restraint and think before you speak. It's definitely much better than oppressing it.

edit: the comment I responded was a bit different, I guess the OP added more thoughts.

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