Greece to ban anonymity on social media
euractiv.com
euractiv.com
No surprise here
There are more ofc:
- https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/apr/06/greek-pm-vows-...
- https://www.euractiv.com/news/top-greek-court-under-fire-aft...
- http://pamfleti.net/english/bota/skandali-me-fondet-e-be-se-...
In a corrupt government, as they are almost all globally, the less state the better.
While I agree with less state, most people refuse to take responsibility for own action and keep playing game by voting for them. Doesn't matter what side, it keeps behemot runnng. But people suffering.
I wonder if there are different levels to this: 1) real identity/name 2) humanness 3) completely anonymous.
(definitely open to other suggested levels)
For example, if someone is posting on the internet with a real name, I want them to actually be that person. If they're posting with a username, I mostly just want them to be a human. I don't know how much I'd be open to it being hard to know whether it was a human or bot.
With regards to reading stats, public or private, I'd still like to know whether human vs bot. I think YouTube and Twitter/X and IG and all these platforms have been gamed by lots of bots pretending to be unique humans and those stats get wildly out of touch with how many humans actually interact (which I think matters for true popularity and advertising and basic understanding of social interactions).
I think the challenge is if it's real identity, often it doesn't split between real identity and simple proof of humanity. Maybe it's not that easy from a tech standpoint, and maybe it's because companies would want to track every move and people want privacy, but maybe it'd be easier if more people wanted it.
So I wonder how to balance this.
I'm curious to hear your thoughts.
If you want to use social media to chill out with your friends, real name mandates for writing can work, at least as long as the content is not too publicly accessible. But if you want to have more interesting conversations than the ones you can have in the local park where you need to watch out for not publicly denouncing the sport favoured by your peers and neighbours in favour of something locally exotic, real name by default will more or less wipe them out.
As for proof of humanness it sounds interesting, but I think it's insufficient. Much like I dislike promotions of interests which are not my own as much when they are done by a human handing out fliers vs a poster showing the same advertisement, I don't think that the sender of the message being a paid or otherwise recruited human is going to make the desirable difference on social media either, even if they're known to be human.
What's really needed is a signal that the content is the persons genuine personal input, and comes without an ulterior agenda. And if such a signal can exist I'd very much like to be able to use it when navigating the physical world as well.
Incidentally (?), on April 26 there was the first conviction for one their trolls, writing on X as GheorghyZhukov. The real identity of the troll was established on trial, and he was convicted for slander and defamation. So maybe the feel that they may soon lose control of the online narrative, so they hope to create a chilling effect for online criticism via banning anonymity?
Amusingly, (locally generated) LLM text becomes an anonymity mask in those scenarios.
https://www.whonix.org/wiki/Surfing_Posting_Blogging#Stylome...
tl;dr intentionally writing in a different style is very effective and overall the best option
btw one upside to public content being ingested in LLM training data. is that certain writing styles (like using the emdash) become much more common, due to reappearing in generated content. this means that if you continue to write in that style, you will blend in more easily. which makes your own content resist stylometric analysis
CIA has always had this privelege.
Are you implying only people who like thinking should be given right to vote or people who like thinking are naturally more inclined to not favor privacy?
Your statements are no less a bite, brother Ставрос. What makes you feel so confident I your superiority?
It works on government too! Greece is the weakest country in the EU. Their chief export is currently stupid ideas, their chief import is poverty. They could improve themselves with some democratic choices but instead they choose to stay at the end of the line.
If you want to talk about the concept itself of removing anonymity: on HN the impact would not be huge, a lot of us are not really anonymous with links to personal sites in our profiles. Reddit is a different beast entirely.
Throw in information Reddit has (ip addresses, user agents etc) and it’s no doubt a certainty.
once again getting the right answer on the internet is posting a wrong one assertively :) thanks
Why is it great that you should be completely deprived of the right to anonymous online communication just because a bunch of people voted on it? Democracy without rights is just mob rule.
Given the country in question, if you lived in a Greek polis participating in democratic debate required you to share the same national identity, anonymous-guy#500 from the polis down the street never had any rights to participate. That's not mob rule but the opposite. It's precisely in the mob where anonymity facilitates violence.
Government can do a lot of things to you when it controls a lot of things.
And what government is doing is harder to see when it's doing millions of things.
Whether it's actually anonymous in practice, and/or whether it starts to go further than that (websites asking for verified gender? First name? City? Full DOB?) will be a real concern but I think there'd be plenty of push back and tech will end up setting norms here through the browser APIs & permissions prompts. In theory in this is all covered under GDPR anyway so requesting or storing information that's not necessary is illegal anyway, and at least explicit requests are less secret than invisible tracking of the same thing - much easier to reject individually, and to litigate abuse collectively.
Want to read a forum in another country? Please submit your application, wait 3–5 business days, and dont forget to declare your browsing intent.
Exactly, and make non-anon networks the norm enough so that most people will never trust anything said on fringe social networks.
I mean, Greece can:
Ban poverty, ban hunger, ban bad sleeping habits.
Ban corruption, ban people saying bad things.
Ban pseudonyms in history books too, wouldnt want anyone hiding behind a pen name.
Ban whistleblowing.
Ban dissent, just to be safe.
Edit: not sure why the downvotes, this will absolutely spur a black market for identities that less than reputable actors will exploit; just like those shady free VPNs that will use your computer as an exit node for their residential proxy network
In the US, AI incarnations of dead kids are used to lobby congress[]. You can resurrect the brutally murdered 10 year old Uzi Garcia, who's hobbies were "football, swimming, and video games" to do his actual secret hobby which is doing the political bidding of adults and talking to congressman. There is literally a button on the page to let this AI resurrected dead relative to talk to congress.
Those are the two political systems under which individuals are not meant to have any secrets from the government...
Yeah, it's toxic behavior, I'm sure of it.
It’s clear that nefarious regimes have won on social media.
It would be interesting to understand the ratio of real human posts to manipulation on twitter for example - I’d imagine it has long ago tipped to majority bot.
Tackling this problem is existential for western democracies. This seems like a reasonable idea. There might be other options (like validated but anonymous) but we have to try something.
It’s worth noting too that many strong western democracies have laws around hate speech and libel that are being broken by anonymous people online - and the citizens of those countries are perfectly happy with those laws.
The vast majority of bots are government funded. Banning anonymity will just mean people only see bots funded by their own government and its allies, making it even more one-sided (because their own government will almost certainly still have the ability to make bots, like in Chinese internet).
Having external actors take control of your democracy is the nightmare scenario - which Ancient Greeks had first hand experience of.
So this is just attempting to regain control of the internet for democracies that are not the US. It’s not going to fix Russia or the US but maybe it will fix Greece at negligible cost.
More generally, many people spew toxicity under the real name. And there’s already nothing stopping a social media from only allowing verified users.
Hate speech and libel laws have already been misused against people who didn’t actually “hate” or lie. Even if Western democracies are falling, this could make them fall faster, so IMO we should try better ideas first.
We don't need to "try" botulism either.
There are costs to open societies... like people being jerks.
Closed societies deny anonymity and are able to punish dissent and opposition easily because they know what everyone is doing at almost all times. Speech ceases to be free which repression becomes rampant.
Pick 1. There is no perfect but don't let perfection be the enemy of the good.
I think that there are many points to address in your comment, not least the definition of "open" and "closed" societies. But anonymous and non-anonymous do not correspond with open and closed. We aren't talking about "people being jerks" we are talking about nation-state adversaries controlling democracies by sock puppeting and astroturfing and other nefarious means of control. These were not attack vectors before we had social media (or at least were much less potent - a letter to the editor from a. non.) but they have become serious ways to influence populations and control narratives. This is bad. This is an existential issue for modern western democracies exactly because they are open liberal societies. If we lived in autocracies it wouldn't matter because we wouldn't have any influence.