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Comment by isodev | Hacker News Reader

I don't like the idea of linking VPN usage with something shady or illegal. Privacy is a human right, and knowing that I'm using a VPN or not doesn't change how "authentic" or truthful the post is.

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The crusade against VPNs is grating to me too. But as long as X is not actually restricting VPN users in any way?

"A guy that posts popular incendiary takes about US politics like it's his job is routing through VPNs and his real location is unknown" might be valuable information to the public.

I think it is reasonable to expect privacy when reading social media. Not so much when posting routinely to millions of people while claiming to be some non-anonymous person you aren’t.

Does the distinction not make sense from your perspective?

No, it doesn't. How would my country of origin change the meaning of my post? Also, putting people in a bracket of a single country is so very American... country of origin is seldom the country of residence or the country you want to hang out with online.

I think, in regimes with total metadata surveillance, the only authentic online speech will rely on reassurance that the handset won’t be able to be tracked down. Without that condition, I have multiple reasons to devalue the speech, even if only a little.

And I think that the Nazi-salute guy who runs Twitter is playing a game with this.

Whatever right to privacy that may exist goes out the window when you’re posting on the World Wide Web.

On the contrary, the World Wide Web is anonymous by the default. The only reason we constantly need to login into places is because big corps want to have walls around their data... and full visibility on what we do online so they can sell it for a lot of money.

Well, I want logins everywhere. I’d like comments made with mTLS to sort to the top. Maybe just comments with mTLS signed by FSF.

Well good, there is a place for you. But going down that road, it means at some point someone will say mTLS is bad because whatever (just like VPNs... and anonymous logins) ... and there won't be signed comments for you anymore, because Elon isn't in the mood for it.

The World Wide Web is not even close to anonymous by default. You selling whatever you’re on?

Most people are terrible at determining how authentic or truthful a post is. So not data to help them do that is helpful.

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