It's not about gutting moderation. They want you to dox yourself to get online. It's a pro-censorship authoritarian-friendly move. I don't believe the narrative that Meta is behind it all either. If they are, they are probably serving someone else.
- Dox, coerce, blackmail, and ruin political candidates, powerful CEOs, and wealthy people. If they watch a category of porn that is embarrassing or have an affair, suddenly you have leverage against them. You can parlay that to accomplish lots of things.
- Make it impossible to talk about certain things and eventually eliminate those things. Porn today, abortion tomorrow. LGBT, women's rights ... it's a tool to start enforcing an ideology. Eventually these things can be disappeared entirely, not just the discourse. You just cordon off and begin washing it away bit by bit, year by year. Once the control mechanisms are in place, it cannot be stopped.
- Kill anonymous communication. This can pin identities to online comments. You can then punish people of the ideology you don't like by denying them jobs, auditing them, etc. This has a chilling effect on political opposition. This also makes it much harder to leak or report information safely and harms the ability to whistle blow.
- In general, this also pushes society into more religious, more conservative views. With it comes a lack of skepticism and a greater appreciation for authority.
- Ultimately, this is a step into 1984. If we go down that route, we will eventually be owned in whole by the authoritarian powers at top. This entire conversation will be memory holed.
Once a right is lost, we will not get it back. Then it's just one step after another into hell.
We must fight this.
Our lives, our freedom, our future - depend on it.
This is mostly fantasy propagated by works of fiction. In the real world release of any evidence of sins has practically zero impact on the wealthy people and when it very occasionally does have an impact it just happens in cases of people who weren't wealthy enough for the circumstances.
Every single one of those people has a noose around their neck and is being told what to do. They have a gun to their head now.
The intelligence apparatus has been exploiting dynamics like this for a long time.
The right to actual real privacy is the same thing as the right to actual real freedom of speech, and we should harm anyone who is trying to take that most basic foundation of all rights away.
I agree with Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
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Edit: I can't respond to comments anymore (HN rate limits on downvotes and commenting within a single thread), but I also wanted to respond to a sibling comment:
> "your team"
Just because I believe in personal freedom of people from the government does not mean I'm left-wing. I agree with some democratic party policies, and I disagree with some others.
I'm not strictly a libertarian either, because I believe government regulation is necessary to prevent monopolies. But over-regulation is also stifling to progress.
But it shouldn't matter what my politics are. Social and economic issues are orthogonal, and frankly, not as potentially dangerous as this one issue.
Democrats and Republicans alike should be aligned on their disdain of surveillance and authoritarianism. Either party in power (or any power) can use it against the "other side" (or the entire population outside of the oligopoly).
These tools are nothing but evil and designed to control. Once they start sinking their teeth in, they only sink in deeper. Every free person should hate them.
Don't be fooled that your team doesn't have people with the same impulses. Privacy and civil liberties exist to protect us from abuse of authority on all sides.
- "Oh I see John is connected to this account. I really don't like this HN comment and opinion he posted, I find it deeply offensive. Put him on the bank KYC fail list."
- "We'd love to give you this mortgage backed by the US government, but why didn't you post the right flag in support of the new hip thing?"
- "Before you login to your retirement account, how much wealth are you secretly harboring there from this job we think you unfairly got due to your privilege?"
- "If you just let us monitor your activity and the ideas you see, we'll stop you from wrong-think and will create a utopia"
If you think the heat has started, you're mistaken. We're not even in the fire yet. It can and will get waaaay worse.
We've been able to push back against these efforts time and time again. Don't stop. Call your legislators. Talk with your friends and get them to do the same. Vote against politicians that support it.
It does work.
North America is rooted. There is no recovery plan.