What we need is a government sponsored regulated social media where we identify ourselves with eID, so that anything you do or say is actually tied to your person. Americans won't understand this but many European countries are already primed for it.
If you want to go slumming you're free to do so, but I want a stable and safe social media as an alternative.
I would love to go back to people not using their real name and an internet that is wild, free and maybe even a little bit dangerous.
Problem is that regional forums in Europe died because of the regulations.
the EU regulations made it harder/less attractive to host a small local forum and I think that was his point
It may just be because people in Europe interact in real life more and don't need an online forum.
forocoches(dot)com
And I have more:
mediavida(dot)com ( it means half-life :) )
And then I have random ones:
redcafe(dot)net foro.acb(dot)com
I read them, and post on them daily, forums are alive and kicking it on europe :)
But we also need a place where we can make sure everyone is a real person, and where everyone stands for what they say online.
In many countries internet forums are technically banned by regulations. HN posted that many user forums in UK were simply deleted because of the excessively heavy burden of the law.
If you don't, then you risk having a police officer show up at your door.
Back to the issue of overweaning government power - if you think the above is fixed by some sort of pseudo-anonymity online which is heavily tilted towards governments ( they know who people are, it's just you that doesn't ) - then I think you are sadly mistaken.
Ultimately the sunlight of transparency is much better than the murky darkness of anonymity - as comfortable as the blanket of anonymity is ( and yep I'm using that pseudo-anonymity right now ).
If you have a democracy then the laws of the land should be those that are agreed by general consent - give or take - and as such applying those laws to people in a way that means they are accountable for their actions isn't a problem - in fact it's the long standing bedrock of civilisation.
The problem in China isn't that they can catch people breaking their laws, it's a problem with how those laws are set in the first place.
So the real issue is stopping a move towards authoritarianism which is a whole larger conversation.
So in the issue above - about the journalist - the question should be about whether the particular hate speech law is correct, rather than worrying about if they appear to breach it whether they can be caught.
In the past 100 years the following countries have slipped from democracies to authoritarian states: Germany, Italy, Spain, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Argentina, Chile, Russia, Turkey, Nicaragua.
Some of them recovered, others never did. Look at Turkey for example. If you think you are safe, you aren't.
Have you considered that massively enables organised criminal elements in democracies and increases the chances of a slide into authoritarianism?
It's a bit like in the good-old days of the internet when everyone trusted everyone else - life was simple and good. Then the bad actors came, and so did SSL, firewalls, n factor auth etc etc. Search engine results became less good as people gamed the rankings.
You have to adapt.
In Europe we take a different view from America - in America mass school shootings are a price worth paying for the right to own a gun. In the UK there is a presumption that they really isn't any good reason for owning a handgun, nevermind an assault rifle, so it's pretty hard to get one.
Freedom is multi-dimensional - and not absolute. I'm free of worrying my child will be shot at school, but less free to own a gun.
Same goes for freedoms on the internet - in the end it's about a pragmatic choice about what's best and I'm saying that pragmatic choice is already encapsulated in centuries of legal tradition - the internet doesn't change that - people, in the end, need to be accountable for their actions.
I doubt she wants this state of affairs to change.
On the other hand, if your house gets burgled, you get a crime reference number and told to take it up with your insurance company.
So? Justice secretary has nothing to do with the police - justice is the courts.
Home secretary is ultimately in charge of the policing policy and in the UK they have no day to day influence over polices actions - the police are quite decentralised. Are you from the UK?
And in terms of the wider government they are supporting Israel's assault in Gaza directly with intelligence and weapon systems and are silent on the daily atrocities - that's hardly pro-palestinian.
I can see on the one side that police should only ever investigate crimes, not non-crimes. and that "a member of the public" is possibly committing a crime if they make false allegations.
on the other hand, we definitely need someone "official" who will investigate allegations, as a public-safety matter. for instance, if someone suddenly starts combing (hah) beauty-supply places for certain chemicals, it should attact some form of scrutiny.
It doesn't really fix people being gullible (so will spread spam/scams or fall for phishing) or angry about some polarizing topic. Conceivably it could encourage civility, but if anything I feel I've seen arguments turn ugly far more often due to the personal nature.
I have 2 fake accounts, one is named, in translation, Secret Dontknow, the other got hacked at some point and after recovering it it had a nice fake attractive asian woman persona on it. I just changed the location and ran with it. Both have yet to face any issues and they are at least 10 y/o accounts. I don't use them all that often but still.. Secret Dontknow is pretty obvious..
In a form like this, if someone is insulted, it is just the idea and words that have been insulted.
When using your last name, it is the real person's identity that has been insulted. Then it goes both ways in a feedback loop involving two real people's real identity without the constraint that face to face confrontation would impose.
The only way to make that worse then would be to have ML algorithms running on top trying to nudge people to but heads for engagement.
Maybe we could design a system that is worse that in order to join you have tell someone using both real names that their newborn baby is ugly and instead of collecting a list of friends you collect a list of enemies. Short of that though we seemed to have really done a great job figuring out the worst possible form of communication.
Are you assuming that the author's own identity will always be masked or throwaway like a sockpuppet? That seems very much like a design choice of the forum.
This can apply to either side. Whether you're a Trump voter in San Francisco or an LGBTQIA+ person in a rural "Bible Belt" community. Doxxing is one of the most serious rules violations on the internet because exposing somebody's real world identity endangers the personal safety of the victim. A real names only policy effectively forces everybody to self-dox or be silenced.
but it also means responsibility, which acts in the opposite direction.
a realnames policy doesn't preclude also offering pseudonyms for sensitive cases.
to me, it seems like the real issue is sockpuppetry - basically a Sybil attack on authenticity/reputation/responsibility.
"That is when we present our solution. Mandatory digital identity verification for all humans, at all times."
(This video is a pitch-perfect parody of MGS2 but also prescient commentary on modern trends)
I want social media to disappear.
The main issue with social media are the recommendation algorithms, and I don't want the government or private companies to be in control of them. In fact, I don't want anyone except myself to be in control of them.
Quit being friend in real life with people who have a social media account on one of the "big" platforms (yes, I do know quite some people who do this!).
> I want social media to disappear
I often read people trashing on social media who are doing so on this site which is very much social media. I don't use other social media sites and appreciate that this one is different than the normal ones. It's still social media as I understand it.
Assuming I'm not wrong about this being social media... If they want social media to disappear, why are they creating more of it by participating here?
I mostly keep my mouth shut, but the embedded contradictions sometimes make me comment to scratch my itch.
Well it is true that newest gives chronological listing. Most of us visit the front page which does not. Instead, it uses the algorithm of user vote aggregation.
On the other hand, while Facebook and the like had me interacting with those in my relational proximity, here it seems I am relating with people more in my cultural and professional proximity (largely due to the rules and cultural norms here). Sometimes it's just small talk and at others more technical or serious life matters but it's communicating with other humans (and likely a few bots) about life, sharing information and ideas, challenging one another to learn and grow. These seem like deeply social behaviors and that's a big part of why I regard this as social media.
With regard to the mall, that seems far more like Twitter or Reddit than here. While Reddit is less clear, Twitter is widely regarded as social media. On the other end is email that is "a human talking to another human" and regarded as not social media. Not to say you're wrong, just trying to explain my view and offer that as a bit of evidence that the boundaries are not so clear.
Speak for yourself, please, would you?
I (a Europeean) don't need this. I dont want to have everything I write archived forever and linked to my identity, so when an extremist political Party gains Power I'm fucked because I have expressed opinions that dont align with their world View.
No thanks. I feel whenever people express thoughts like yours, you completely ignore all the damage this may cause to individuals and democracy alike.
There is no need for social media, a ten thousand idiots does not make one smart man.
Obviously that's not what it is any more and would agree you could argue that its not really needed any more - but it started out well, not sure when or where it went completely off the tracks.
Yea, it is like a catapult. You need to let go of it at some point to keep moving forward, or it is going to pull you back or at least stop you from making further progress.
>but it started out well, not sure when or where it went completely off the tracks.
Good intentions or In this case, moderation. You know that I cannot go into detail here without pissing the moderators here, right? Yea, exactly my point.
I don't need to link letters to a government issued ID to use the postal service. Why should government provided social media or email or whatever be any different?
This makes sense because the only realistic way to enforce a non-falsified return address would be to verify government issued ID when accepting the parcel.
It's an interesting point thought that receiving messages does require a physical address. I guess the analogy would be needing to log in to browse the message board but not to post? That would be quite strange.
So, Facebook? "Real-name systems" are all, unequivocally, bad.
Real name systems (for routine discourse) are bad. Walled gardens are bad. I should not need to forsake my privacy unless I wish to or alternatively a material need exists.
Don't need to connect the account? What sort of joke is that? They require you to use your government recognized name.
Your last sentence also just doesn’t make any sense. Why would you worry about platform x if „they“ „know“ everything anyways. I was talking about your anonymous online personas.
Complaining about potential guidelines on one platform when numerous unrestricted spaces exist online seems rather narrow minded, especially given the abundance of alternatives available. Just use it as a modern telephone book. You have total agency over yourself and if or how you use it.
Nir Eyal would like a word
>If following the platform's basic guidelines feels like too much effort,
That's the straw elephant in the room
>perhaps the communication wasn't that important to begin with.
And this is the particularly dehumanizing part
>entitlement
Is that what entitlement is? Preferring to avoid using the services of an unethical vendor if possible? Or is the entitlement in the "being able to afford to avoid..."?
If multiple services require you to use the same identifier then those accounts are trivial for anyone to find and link.
The existence of alternative services with different terms does not address the issues raised in this thread. Neither does it change the fact that I think the existence of real name policies makes society worse. Of course I'm going to complain about that.
> Just use it as a modern telephone book.
Other people upload information about me into said book. There are various things that I can't do unless I use said book and those have nothing to do with looking up contact information.
It would be bad enough if the only issue were that the provider of the telephone book could every contact lookup. Unfortunately that is but the tip of the metaphorical iceberg.
You: "You don't have to use Facebook if you don't want to"
Them: "Sometimes it's required for some important task"
You: "Why not simply sign up for Facebook and use it?"
We were talking about the impact that platforms with real name policies have on society simply by existing and being widely used. Particularly relevant considering that the first comment in the thread was about just such a platform being officially provided by the government and tying accounts to a government issued ID. The second comment in the chain, which you responded to, explicitly referenced Facebook.
> you all seem to love condescending rage comments.
Your arguments don't hold any water and you're having difficulty accepting that fact.
When you get down to it, what's our real minimum requirement for curbing scams and spams?
We do not need to know someone's legal identity, in fact we don't even need to know if they're a person rather than a person-with-a-program, we just need to know that they have a person-sized footprint of "skin in the game", as opposed to sockpuppets in a botnet.
Then when you sign up to a site like HN, the administrator has a policy: "New accounts must supply proof from the last year which hasn't already been used on this site before."
There's a lot of technical detail we could go into about how to maximize user privacy (so that you can't be tracked across sites) and prevent a site from "stealing" and reusing things that were shared with it... but the key point is that 99% of sites do not need identity-information to accomplish their moderation goals or personalized block-lists. Such a system could actually be cheaper and more equitable than one based on permanent government IDs.
What you’re advocating for is making a bad system worse. Your suggestion won’t solve any problem and will introduce new ones, like making manipulation and censorship easier. You’re advocating for an authoritarian’s wet dream (and a treasure trove for data miners). Right now, including in Europe, that’s the last thing we need.
I vote a hard no on your proposal. I’m opposed to it like I am to Chat Control.
Signed,
A European
This is absolutely untrue for manipulation. Currently, private (both American and Chinese) social media platforms have become mouthpieces of authoritarian propaganda and misinformation. Russian bot farms cooperate with American billionaires to push destabilizing extremist propaganda and suppress moderate voices.
And I agree that outlawing all non-ID media would open the floodgates for government censorship. But that is not the proposal here: the proposal is to provide an alternative, which guarantees that the opinion you read is, in fact, the opinion of a real (European) person, not the output of an LLM trained on the hateful ramblings of the Yarvins and Dugins of this world. If that's not what you want, you're free to go back to TikTok, X or Facebook.
We are in agreement on "chat control" and similar anti-encryption political schemes, but the social media question pertains to public, not private, communications.
Signed,
Colin Emonds (of Cologne, Germany)
A European
It wouldn't only update the floodgates, it's rather the idea behind these proposals. :-)
Which is an orthogonal issue. Private social media doing it does not mean government-owned social media wouldn’t. In fact, it is precisely because authoritarians already can see it working that they would salivate at the though.
> And I agree that outlawing all non-ID media would open the floodgates for government censorship. But that is not the proposal here
You’re agreeing with and rebutting things I haven’t said. I don’t think the proposal was to outlaw other forms of social media. I still think the proposal is bad on its own.
> which guarantees that the opinion you read is, in fact, the opinion of a real (European) person, not the output of an LLM trained on the hateful ramblings of the Yarvins and Dugins of this world.
It guarantees no such thing. There’s nothing stopping that real person from asking an LLM and posting the reply directly. That already happens today. Heck, people confidently post screenshots of LLM conversations as if they were fact even when they’re provably wrong.
> If that's not what you want, you're free to go back to TikTok, X or Facebook.
I personally don’t use any of those, and neither would I defend them. Again, my argument is those are already bad and OP’s proposal is just as bad and then adds worse things on top.
The point is that it prevents multi-accounting and deliberate astroturfing campaigns. If people personally decide to just trust ChatGPT screenshots as gospel and assume LLM outout as their opinion, that's their own prerogative.
- do you think it is so hard to track people by their other behavior? that is, do pseudonyms actually work?
- isn't harrassment by realnamed actors a failure of the (out-of-band) legal system?
2. Maybe I don’t understand the question, but I don’t see how that’s relevant or true. Social media is routinely used as evidence in court.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/andrewarnold/2018/12/30/heres-h...
If pseudonyms didn't work, no one would be proposing the policy that he proposes. And nearly everyone seems to propose it or some variation of it.
I await the new AOL or whatever.
That has already happend. Though the algorithm(s) trained the lonely humans to do it. Happening right here, right now.
If it is the case, I will leave to greener pastures.