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Comment by space_ghost | Hacker News Reader

Followed immediately by these groups making VPNs a standard part of their toolkit. This data is enlightening but its reveal doesn't solve the problem.

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Twitter can require verification on their end or require ID upload or something along those lines. The social media companies can solve this problem, it’s just way too profitable to not. They make a lot of money when you read about non-existent events from an account curated in China or India or Belarus and then go look at a bunch of ads for Patriot Bars (R) or Rainbow socks (L) or whatever.

They could by default for example require an identification of some sort, and then allow “non-ID” accounts to exist but require specific opt-in to view broadly or something along those lines.

More easily though you can just delete your account and then you don’t have to care about any of this crap.

There's already pretty sophisticated setups to get fake live ID verifications where it's already a cat and mouse game between the tools to verify and the tools faking live verifications (sometimes including just scamming people into acting as the 'user' for verification). Ideally I'd also not have to provide my ID for yet another inane service and risk that ID getting leaked as seems to be inevitable.

Yea that’s fair. I guess the easy/best solution is to just not use the product in that case.

But I’d be in favor of even an in-person verification system though the costs to do that would be unpalatable but I guess you could stand up a 3rd party to do that. Maybe there are better solutions out there that I’m not thinking of. I do know it’s very much against what the larger social media companies would want though because they actively want you to be outraged and misinformed since they make a lot of money off of that.

I've recently (last several years) started framing my use/consideration of services and products as a dependency. I find myself arriving at "I'd rather go without than depend on xyz" quite often.

I wish they had included it as part of the RealID system. It would have been pretty easy to make them smart cards that could use simple public private key tech to verify IDs. Private keys go into the cards and public keys get registered with the state agency issuing the IDs. It's not perfect but it'd at least be a pseudonymous way to verify ID possession.

It seems like they are using a more sophisticated way to determine location (App Store download county, etc) not just IP.

Twitter reveals when it thinks users are using a VPN and tries to guess the origin location regardless, though with quite low accuracy

yeah it needs to be robust enough to keep a trail so it can detect leaks and predict, and perhaps eventually identify vpn nodes, like Reddit will often block my request when I’m on VPN so there may be a way to smartly disregard certain requests from being counted as the true location, this seems really complicated the more I think about it though

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