Comment by trulynissin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by trulynissin | Hacker News Reader

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It's fairly interesting to me that a lot of People seem to be against the idea of showing ID to use social media, but companies like Meta have verification badges that require a Government Issued ID and a Payment Details to further verify your identity, Twitter (which does not seem to require gov ID) and Meta have both said that verified creators will be shown more, while this will obviously de-boosting non-paying, and subsequently non ID verified, users which essentially incentivizes giving these Platforms your personal information in order to actually use them properly.

An excerpt from a Meta Article on the matter reads: "At this time, Meta Verified will only support your real name on your profile. Once your profile is verified, you can’t change the profile name, username, date of birth, or photo on your profile without going through the Meta Verified subscription and verifications application process again."

If paid users are being boosted, more people are led to believe they need to pay the monthly fee to be seen, the user base of ID verified users increases, and Social Media basically becomes ID Verified, without the need for any laws to pass.

There are people who use social media without the desire to be "seen" or recommended to random people via an algorithm.

But beyond that the difference is that with the Arkansas law, users don't have the _choice_ to remain anonymous. With verification, a user can simply sacrifice broader reach to maintain that anonymity.

My point was more that we're already being conditioned to think that verifying your identity on Social Media shouldn't be seen as a big deal, because in some cases you get a "cool" badge or broader reach out of it, thus leading to less outrage if a broader version of this hit the rest of the U.S. There are people who use social media without the desire to remain anonymous as the entire "social" aspect implies that you're going to be sharing details of your life with others in some way, and if they only wanted to share to close friends they'd make their profiles private? This especially impacts platforms like Instagram and Facebook, Link Aggregators like HN hardly fit into this at all, and any bill that hits the senate floor would likely make their scope incredibly clear to target specific social media platforms where hateful and inappropriate content is usually spread, as the OP Article states: "shielding minors from the harmful effects of social media" .

> There are people who use social media without the desire to be "seen" or recommended to random people via an algorithm.

Social media without the desire to be "seen" or recommended to random people, is just a messaging app.

Firstly, social media is as much push, as it is pull. Far more people consume content then create it and do not care about being seen.

But even still, for people that do post, social media has many forms. I personally use it to interact with people in my social circle, but not much further.

Take Twitter. I follow friends, and even some random content creators I'm familiar with from other platforms. I post, but with the knowledge that only a select few people will see it (in fact, I remove followers I don't know externally). But I strictly avoid algorithmically "recommended" content, sticking to just my chronological news feed.

And? I remember when Friendster, Facebook, MySpace and friends were focused on sharing updates and communication with your circle, not blasting the entire Internet. Frankly social media was better then. I often struggle to see the point in it now.

That is an opt-in process at the level of the organization. If FB, TWTR, etc decide to push ID verification, we will see how users feel about it. It is a free-market.

However, if the govt decides to push ID verification, the user loses all choice because this will be applied to all social media platforms (like HN).

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