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Comment by edgyquant | Hacker News Reader

Everything is a trade off in the world. I think that people who are anti-id ignore this but for me personally it’s harder and harder to accept the trade offs of an internet without id. AI has only accelerated this, I don’t want to live in a world where the average person unknowingly interacts with bots more than other individuals and where black market actors can sway public opinion with armies of bots.

I think most people are aligned here, and that an internet without identification is inevitable whether we like it or not.

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Astroturfing was already a thing.

Identification fixes nothing here, you log with your account, plug in the AI.

The problems with social media have nothing to do with ID and everything to do with godawful incentives, the argument seems to be that it's a large price to pay but that it's worth it. Worth it for what? The end result is absolutely terrible either way

Astroturfing will still be a thing after ID. What, you think the government is going to go after their own bot armies?

I think it would be a lot more difficult for anyone to do and it isn’t like people will be using government platforms at least not in the west

>I think it would be a lot more difficult for anyone to do

Why? Like, what makes you think that?

Because of ID tracking? Say you have attach your government approved ID to use social media. It is now trivial to check how many accounts you have made and how much you have posted. You certainly can't be posting faster than the fastest typist in the world. And if you're mostly just copy pasting, is the quality of the posts actually worth engaging with?

While I am not against internet ID, there is a case to be made for social media for the harms they are causing.

Let's say the government issues hundreds of thousands of IDs to people who don't exist and uses them to verify bots (or room full of paid humans) that post pro-government messages all day, at "normal" rates that a human posts.

It's amazing how there is a much larger crowd, of completely real people, who approve of the government, than those nasty dissenters. We know they're real people because we trust the government vouching for its own IDs.

And because of the real ID policy, the government can also ask the social media company for the ID used by opposed posters, and find out where they live and "visit" them, maybe "warn" them.

Hooray for democracy!

This sounds like an unreasonable amount of distrust in a government. If a government is truly malicious, it no longer matters if an ID was issued in the first place.

Take the current US administration. If they were to point the finger at a user for something the government didn't like, I doubt many people will agree, and more likely people will be opposed to the government than the user. The most important thing is to prevent government from abusing violence on the people for speaking up, which is somewhat lacking in the US.

More effort should be done to hold governments accountable, not finding ways to skirt around it.

It doesn't even have to be malicious. The UK government had the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windrush_scandal where it lost the only identity documents of thousands of people, and also tried to remove them from the UK for not having these documents.

Governments shouldn't work like Google's technical support, where they are in 100% control and you have zero recourse if they don't like you, or even if they just fuck up. Governments should be accountable to their people, there need to be systems (like courts) to rein in the government's unlawful actions. It goes without saying that government shouldn't build fully centralised systems of authority, and certainly shouldn't be implicitly trusted by third parties - because when they do that, things go badly for the citizens of that government. Or citizens of other countries (see e.g. the USA fucking with ICC staff)

...and yet here we are, discussing systems that would lock people out of all sorts of things if they won't or can't get a trusted proof they're in a central database we trust the custodians of 100% - those custodians never make mistakes or abuse their position, right? Why the rush to adopt the more fragile system?

What I worry about is more and more "nudge theory" or dark patterns coming in; you may be entitled to something, or have rights, and the government doesn't like people having that, or paying for people to have it. They won't say "no, people can't have these rights and entitlements" and take the hit at the ballot box (though sometime they do and that is strictly worse), but they will deliberately put in roadblocks and gotchas (digital or otherwise) that oh-so-unfortunately sometimes don't work, or are cumbersome and thus discourage people from exercising their rights.

Point taken on incompetence as opposed to maliciousness. I'm not gung ho on a central database. Perhaps issuing a physical ID, similar to driving license would suffice? And if we want to prevent having tech corps scanning your face, just make it a pin locked card, ala bank cards. Social media isn't a human right anyways.

It is now trivial to check how many posts many people in social media make with their own accounts, and astroturfing campaigns still happen.

Why would social media companies fight against this? They, much like the public actually like the engagement. That is the whole problem.

Look at X, where you can now see where people are posting from, do people honestly engage with the feature? No, they don't bother to check if they agree with the content and they use it as an excuse to dismiss in bad faith if they don't like the content.

This is not a control problem, social media networks are not at a loss of options in how to engage with this, they don't want to, the point can be made that states might want to fix this and are unable to, but if that was actually the case there's half a dozen better ways to do that, among them, banning the services.

The idea that the entirety of the population ought to throw privacy away so people can still browse Instagram is repugnant to me.

I think we're speaking past each other. I'm talking about the way a single user can create multiple accounts on a single platform to create the illusion of consensus. If you repeatedly see a single user creating many posts / comments on a single topic, it quickly satiates your attention.

With an approved ID, it will be trivial to enforce 1 ID 1 account on 1 platform. This is not possible now.

To my knowledge, no country has tried it before up until recently. The issue of government distrust is valid, but that shifts the problem to one of government accountability, not accessibility. Demand the rule of law to be upheld, hold those in power accountable and be vigilant of their trespasses, do not abdicate what little power you hold. That is what is required for civil society to function properly.

1) ID checks will not close the trade off. Real IDs are easily available on the market. Thus criminals will used them no problem. It's the law-abiding privacy-minded people (like me) who would be hurt the most.

2) Your point is valid. I too want to know whether I am engaging with a bot or a person. This is impossible now and it will be impossible once ID check becomes ubiquitous.

3) I will be happy to see (or not) a blue checkmark by the profile name. Just like in Twitter. That's enough.

100% correct. At this point the harms to children from social media use are very well documented.

Like everything else in society, there are tradeoffs here, I'm much more concerned with the damage done to children's developing brains than I am to violations of data privacy, so I'm okay with age verification, however draconian it may be.

We need to destroy privacy and anonymity online for the noble goal of the government banning teenagers from looking at Twitter and Instagram?

If it's a concern, parents can prevent or limit their children's use. If all this were being done to prevent consistent successful terrorist attacks in the US with tens of thousands of annual casualties, I'd say okay maybe there is an unavoidable trade-off that must be made here, but this is so absurd.

It isn’t just about teenagers though I think I outlined that? We need to make sure people online are real people and yes we should prevent kids from being exposed to algorithms designed to addict then.

Adults are nearly as susceptible to such addiction. If this is the goal then the actual legislation should be to prohibit social media companies from doing it to anyone. (I think this would be government overreach and a possible first amendment violation, though. I say this as a center-left person who deeply hates what Musk has done to Twitter. I would even describe myself as an anti-free speech person; I just respect the nation's laws and the principle that the state should not be able to imprison you just for speech.)

"Preserving privacy and anonymity online" is not an inherent good. It depends on how it is being used and what the consequences on society are.

Thus far, privacy and anonymity have been used to get children addicted to garbage, distribute CSAM, create elaborate schemes of financial fraud (cryptocurrency), and develop drug distribution networks.

It's completely reasonable to limit privacy in order to combat these social evils.

> At this point the harms to children from social media use are very well documented

Our middle child (aged 12) has an Android phone, but it has Family Link on it.

Nominally he gets 60 mins of phone time per day, but he rarely even comes close to that, according to Family Link he used it for a total of 17 minutes yesterday. One comes to the conclusion that with no social media apps, the phone just isn't that attractive.

He seems to spend most of his spare time reading or playing sports...

most kids dont have parents who care to that degree.

As part of the unofficial bargain in which we limit screen time I get to spend a big chunk of my spare time driving him (and his siblings) to and from various sports fixtures.

Just one of the many joys of parenting :)

I commend this but I always try to think about the arguments for something like cigarettes. People didn’t buy the argument that parents need to be preventing their kids from smoking

Do you genuinely believe the major tech companies and gov reps actually want to close their addiction revenue taps?

No the argument is bad actors will reliably find a way to bypass these systems at an industrial scale while you'll instead snag honest people instead.

Look at the facebook real name policy.

This sounds a lot like the pro-gun rhetoric of bogging down the "good" gun owners but not doing enough to the "bad" gun owners.

It's not really the same. The good guy/bad guy gun rhetoric has deeply racist roots.

But beyond that we can look at places similar things have been rolled out.

Facebook has a real name policy and is overflowing with fraudsters and ai slop

Although I can't figure out how to sign up for a second telegram account with their phone number restriction that hasn't stopped multiple scammers hitting me up every day on the service.

On YouTube, their demographics has ladies in their 30s watching nursery rhyme videos by the millions because mothers give their children their phone.

On social media, scammers tend to take over the accounts of dead people because the deceased don't update their passwords after a data breach. Your ID card policy, however strict, isn't going to stop the most common attack vector

So I don't know what you're trying to solve with id checks: parents hand their logged in devices to their children, scammers raid the accounts of the verified dead, existing systems clearly aren't working and strictly enforcing ineffective security theater isn't going to change this

I'm all for empathizing with the concerns but doing something that doesn't work isn't a solution

On telegram and YouTube, I take your points, thank you.

To be honest, I find many holes the ID method myself and it stems from the free and abundant nature of the internet where anything goes everywhere. If I could take an analogy, it's like we have allowed casinos to be built all around the neighborhood and now have no political will to stop children from entering, though I do concede that it's much easier to stop a child from entering a casino than access to internet. Perhaps China was on to something with the great firewall, though I doubt the efficacy of that method as well.

But back to the use of ID, is there not an argument to be made that doing something is better than nothing? Personally, I would like the banning of algorithmic content and that online peers should only be found through intent and not recommended by the platform, but I digress.

> I think that people who are anti-id ignore this

No we do not.

>I don’t want to live in a world where the average person unknowingly interacts with bots more than other individuals and where black market actors can sway public opinion with armies of bots.

That is not the argument for identification on many places on the internet. It's not even the argument that the gov reps pushing it typically make. And why would it be. The companies that go along with all this don't want to get rid of all bots and public opinion campaigns. They make money off of many of those.

ID verification doesn't protect against that. Why not? Because there are a lot of people that will trade their ID for a small amount of money, or log someone/something in. IDs are for sale, like everyone who was ever a high school student knows for "some" reason.

Plus what you're asking would require international id verification for everyone, which would first mostly make those IDs a lot cheaper. But there's a second negative effect. The organizations issuing those IDs, governments, are the ones making the bot armies. Just try to discuss anything about Russia, or how bad some specific decision of the Chinese CCP is. Or, if you're so inclined: think about how having this in the US would mean Trump would be authorizing bot armies.

This exists within China, by the way, and I guarantee you: it did not result in honest online discussion about goods, services or politics. Anonymity is required.

You're not thinking more than one step ahead. If you let a third party define who "has ID", "is human", etc. you give that third party control over you. You already gave control of your attention away to the sites who host the UGC, now you also give away control of your sense of reality.

At any point they can tell a real human what they can and can't say, and if they go against their masters, their "real human" status is revoked, because you trust the platform and not the person.

If we want to go full conspiritard, we could accuse those of wanting to control speech to be the financial backers of those flooding social media with AI slop: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gGLvg0n-uY -- this fictional video thematically marries Metal Gear Solid 2's plot with current events: "perfect AI speech, audio and video synthesis will drown out reality [...] That is when we will present our solution: mandatory digital identity verification for all humans at all times"

I am though. In the world I live in I already have to give power over myself to corporations and a government, I don’t buy this as an argument for continuing to let internet companies skirt existing laws.

I don't know what to say. You will live in a world "where the average person unknowingly interacts with bots more than other individuals and where black market actors can sway public opinion with armies of bots", even more so after you and I and everyone on the planet are compelled to provide our identity at all times.

The various government actions trying to force "robust" age verification on the internet are being woefully naive in trusting other internet companies and letting them skirt existing laws on data protection.

That's not even mentioning other factions whose real goal is in shutting down legal speech that doesn't meet their Christian agenda: https://theintercept.com/2024/08/16/project-2025-russ-vought...

You are being a useful idiot, sorry. Your weakness is what politicians exploit when they say "think of the children", you fail to see the amoral power-grabs hiding beneath their professed sentiment.

I don't want you encouraging people to demand my identity because you trust "authorities" taking yours

(Disclaimer: American perspective)

Why don't we have PKI built in to our birth certificates and drivers licenses? Why hasn't a group of engineers and experts formed a consortium to try and solve this problem in the least draconian and most privacy friendly way possible?

newer passports and driver licenses do.

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