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Comment by reillyse | Hacker News Reader

This will be very interesting to observe. Social media is a cesspool and getting worse by the minute. Even hacker news is being inundated with bots. On controversial topics tons of new accounts appear arguing divisively both sides of the argument.

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.

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One country (Greece) with an ineffective law will have negligible impact on the entire internet. Are there popular Greek-only social medias?

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.

Yes but for Greeks it will have an impact and we can determine if it’s beneficial.

We already know the answer.. it's totalitarian bullshit and/or sheer incompetency to make motion appear like progress.

We don't need to "try" botulism either.

How do we know that? Honest question. Anonymity is just not a feature of normal political or civil life in most countries. In fact it can often be contrary to civility. I don't see why removing Anonymity and preventing foreign meddling in ones country is a bad thing.

Who's "we?" There is no shared or special knowledge, but any superficial application of critical thinking reaches obvious conclusions quickly. I can only inform from my perspective but cannot think for you.

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.

This is a pretty incoherent comment. You realize you mentioned “we” first so calling me out for using inclusive language doesn’t really make any sense. As for the rest of it, it’s all super basic half baked ideas that even to discuss we would have to spend 10x the amount of characters defining what nonsense you are talking about.

In retrospect I should not have made this comment, I was frustrated and replied rudely.

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.

It's incredible how much I can agree with you yet still be revolted beyond measure that I'd have to have my every word online tracked by governments. They are fundamentally untrustable agents, with incredible state powers & a monopoly on force that they regularly abuse. Them demanding access to knowing every word that every person writes is not ok.

If this problem can actually be solved (requirement for both anonymity and ID in different spaces online without AI infiltration), it appears to be a long road to get there...

But the us gov already knows everything you type online - Snowden told us that years ago - they have a direct pipe from all the major internet companies.

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.

>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.

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).

Excluding foreign influence is still a huge win.

Having external actors take control of your democracy is the nightmare scenario - which Ancient Greeks had first hand experience of.

Facebook's real name policy did nothing to stop it being a cesspool. I don't expect that this will have a positive effect on public discourse.

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