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Comment by repeekad | Hacker News Reader

How do you ban psyops? Require every user register with a gov ID so there’s someone to go after? What’s a psyop vs a grassroots contrarian movement like LGBT used to be?

Anonymity online seems the ultimate double edge sword. I prefer privacy over government prescribed safety.

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I know I'm in the crazy minority but I'm over anonymity at this point. I want to know who's a real person and sincerely who they claim to be. The harms of trolling, scamming and societal mis/disinformation, for me, outweigh whatever benefit exists in anonymity. I've never assumed I was anonymous from the government anyway so really, we're just anonymous from one-another. Seems like a classic method of divide and conquer now that I think about it. All that said, I have no idea how to safely enforce ID'ing without some kind of authority (goverment or ideally something else).

I'm willing to violate laws in order to facilitate people you claim are disinformation-spreading anonymous trolls being able to speak online anyway.

You investigate and punish groups found to be running psyops, simple as. No need to automate the whole process with ID checks, these organizations make and spend money so the tracks are there to find. If suspected drag them into discovery and gather evidence like you would for financial fraud or criminal conspiracy.

They are often in other countries, and there are much worse crimes to focus attention on with a limited budget. This does happen and should more often, but it’s far from a full solution.

Sure, let's just give the state a pretext to jail anyone espousing opinions they don't like for running a psyop. Surely no government will abuse this power and brand anyone in their opposition as a psyop bot army that needs to be removed from the internet.

a 4 month old account making a bad faith argument, well I never!

If they want to they'll do that under any pretense they can get away with. See the current administration declaring intent to treat pro-LGBT speech or anti-fascist speech as indicative of participation in terrorist groups.

You just can't let a government get this bad, and the set of rules and procedures you need to reign in a tyrant are pretty different from the ones you need to keep a system stable and functioning under normal operation.

Right now you can in fact express pro LGBT or anti fascist opinions despite the administration's efforts to stop you precisely because there are no such regulations.

Had a previous US administration thought that the US is a stable and functional democracy that can be entrusted with such a law, you will be in trouble.

It's not for a lack of laws granting the necessary powers; anti-terror laws passed in the wake of 9/11 allow for basically arbitrary use of warrantless surveillance and specifying any enemy as a terrorist. The reason this admin hasn't been successful in vindictively prosecuting its enemies is because they've only captured the Supreme Court, not the majority of the legislature. It's up to judges to interpret the law and decide if it's being applied appropriately. If you write an anti-psyop law it's far from impossible to make clear in the text what sort of organization it is meant to apply to. That's the case for all laws. Where it breaks down is when the legislature changes its interpretation standards. And at that point any law can be interpreted to mean anything and rule of law breaks down, so it doesn't really matter what laws you have or don't have on the books.

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