18 ms·

The End of Online Anonymity (2019)

73 points by vmoore 5y ago

blakesterz 5y ago
This is from 2019. The author says fake content is going to be too hard to identify so there is only one effective way to stop it, and that is to verify that everyone who posts content is in fact human. And that least to the end of anonymity. " Ultimately, one possibility is that online platforms will begin requiring a verified government ID in order to register. We could even end up living in a world where a kind of “e-passport”, crypto-signed government ID is attached to your every internet connection, and tracked everywhere online."
- baremetal 5y ago
  not sure how that would stop misuse and abuse on the internet. not like the bad guys are suddenly going to respect the law.
  - JauntyHatAngle 5y ago
    That's a rather handwavey statement. The hypothetical presented is essentially a highly regulated walled garden. "Bad guys" would be blocked or cited. If all content is tied to an ID, yes it would work. China has shown that for the most part you can regulate the majority of discourse in an online space if you wall it off to the bit you control. Not sure how this is different. Not that I agree with it. Not a fan of the suggestion myself.
    - mtgx 5y ago
      you're assuming that those IDs can't be forged. Pretty big assumprion. When in history has existed an id or authentication method that couldn't be forged or broken?
    - yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
      And Facebook has demonstrated that requiring real identities doesn't stop misinformation at all.
      - JauntyHatAngle 5y ago
        The question was bots and controlling discourse, not misinformation.
    - TigeriusKirk 5y ago
      If it's too hard to identify fake content, how do you identify bad guys, even if you know their IDs? What difference does it make what ID is attached to information if you can't identify it as fake? If you can identify it as fake, the whole premise evaporates.
      - piptastic 5y ago
        I don't think the premise evaporates. There's a solvable difference between checking an ID against a database of IDs you control, vs identifying the fakeness of any other piece of random information.
- logicalmonster 5y ago
  > The author says fake content is going to be too hard to identify so there is only one effective way to stop it I strongly disagree with the author that there's only one effective way to stop misinformation. Remember, the real problem isn't the existence or proliferation of misinformation, which is both incredibly subjective and impossible to prevent without a central source of truth which is fraught with ethical problems. The problem is that many people uncritically believe anything they read, see, or hear. You could solve the actual problem of misinformation tomorrow if there was a concerted societal messaging that said something like the following: "Everything you read online, from any source, may be inaccurate. People with money and power try and manipulate you for even more money and power. Verify everything with multiple sources, consider all possibilities and peoples' motives, and use your brain." This will never happen because powerful people want to have their cake and eat it too: politicians want you to believe all of the words that come out of their mouth, but not trust the naughty "conspiracy theories" about them being insider traders, for instance.
  - yissp 5y ago
    I think everybody already knows that you shouldn't trust anonymous, un-sourced information you read online, and I doubt simply reminding them of this would do much good. It's just really hard to constantly be vigilant. Even on this site, I've caught myself casually reading an article or comment and taking the claims at face-value, and then reading a response that actually does cite reputable sources showing it was complete bull-shit.
    - logicalmonster 5y ago
      > everybody already knows that you shouldn't trust anonymous, un-sourced information you read online * Your comment makes no sense in light of the establishment freaking out about "misinformation" online. If everybody already knew what not to trust, then why are they freaking out about misinformation spreading wildly on social media? * You yourself claim that you find yourself believing unsourced claims at face value, so there's a contradiction there too. I thought you already knew what you shouldn't trust. * There is no definitive source of truth that exists. Even if something is sourced by a "verified source", it can be false information, if even just by lying by omission. CNN, Fox News, Snopes, all politicians, and Facebook's fact checkers get things wrong or tell falsehoods. Trusting an "official source" is not a prescription to avoiding misinformation.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
superkuh 5y ago
Platforms can do anything they want and most already do require real name verification. But platforms are only the tiny, centralized, commercial part of online. There are vast expanses of niche communities and individual's webservers out there that will never require anything like that.
- sharikous 5y ago
  They could easily be forced to by some law
  - smitty1e 5y ago
    Laws can be written to do anything, including repealing gravity. But if there is no enforcement mechanism, then all the lawmakerd achieve is diluting their credibility. We need to ask if any freshy anonymity law (no matter the content) is an improvement. Because bad law will worsen the issue that it attempts to address.
Cynddl 5y ago
> We could even end up living in a world where a kind of “e-passport”, crypto-signed government ID is attached to your every internet connection, and tracked everywhere online. […] The rise of bots could render many online communities simply uninhabitable. > We are moving towards a model where the internet is dominated by a few centralized content providers and their walled gardens, and generated content may unfortunately make it even harder for grassroots online communities to survive and grow. The author makes a good and fair analysis of the situation, yet I don't see how advocating for e-IDs is going to make the Internet a better place. This is a very ‘platform-focused’ critique that assume that the Internet tends toward more centralisation, where communities are packed together in massive platforms that regulate who communicates to whom and how. Where do we see a need to regulate ‘fake news’ and artificially generated content? Facebook Pages? Twitter? Youtube? These are all hyper-global platforms focused on content monetization. On the other hand, local Facebook groups and the feed of your friends, Github repositories, Mastodon… may not face the same future. Maybe there's a lesson to learn here?
- tomrod 5y ago
  It's FUD. So long as applications in any form can connect to an internet, people can route around The Internet. Gopher as an example shows that alternative protocols can be created outside the modern approach. Mesh networking as well.
- maxime_cb 5y ago
  OP here. Surprised to see an old blog post resurface like this. Just to be clear, I am not in favor of a centralized e-ID type of system. I think that would be a very ugly world to live in. I don't think that an e-ID is a good thing. This is why I talk about a web of trust at the end of the post. We need a better solution that doesn't rely on centralized control. > On the other hand, local Facebook groups and the feed of your friends, Github repositories, Mastodon… may not face the same future. Maybe there's a lesson to learn here? The way I see it, right now, bots are just not capable enough and it's not cost effective enough to try to gain access to these smaller communities. Facebook is a prime target because a single account gains you access to billions of users. That makes it worthwhile to farm out account creation to actual humans. I do think smaller and more niche platforms will probably always be less subject to influence, but, there's money and power to be gained by influencing public opinion on any platform. So it's just a matter of time. Eventually there will be bots that are smart enough to create an account on any platform without human supervision and that are much less heavy handed and obvious. These bots will be able to auto-generate profile pictures and play more of a "long game" in terms of gaining your trust.
wedn3sday 5y ago
I find the sentence, "right to remain anonymous online," intriguing. Since when do we have this right? Where is this right written, and who decided we had it? I wouldnt be at all surprised if a poll of the HN community found that we all thought that we had (or should have) this right, but when did we all collectively make that decision? Since some time around 2014 I've been advocating in private around the issue of automated inanity engines and their rise to prominence. IMO online anonymity does more harm then good right now, and we still havent seen the full power of things like GPT-3 in the hands of nation state actors (or maybe we have and just dont know it).
- tkot 5y ago
  I guess the same question could be asked in the opposite direction, so to speak - isn't a belief that such a right exists enough for it to exist, even if it's unwritten?
- medo-bear 5y ago
  if things are unregulated then online anonymity comes naturally. on the other hand, it is anti-anonymity that is unnatural because it needs to be enforced. so no one needed to decide we have the right to anonymity, but "someone" is trying to decide that we don't have that right
  - shadowgovt 5y ago
    > if things are unregulated then online anonymity comes naturally. I think that, unfortunately, this statement is a bit too strong. An unregulated world doesn't stop private actors from pseudonymously using resources and lying about themselves, of course, but it also doesn't stop owners of network fabric or service providers comparing log data to de-pseudonymize a user. In the absence of regulation, the predominant factor is just what people want to do.
    - medo-bear 5y ago
      my point is that option of anonymity comes naturally, as opposed to someone needing to grant you that right. privacy is also a natural right, yet nothing stops anyone from putting an eat to your bedroom door, so to speak
agumonkey 5y ago
In a situation like that, the system cannot sustain itself.. it will have to crash I believe.
sandworm101 5y ago
>> Since when do we have this right? [...] but when did we all collectively make that decision? December 15th, 1791. As explained by SCOTUS as recently as 1995 (McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Commission) anonymous speech is baked into the first amendment, putting it at the core of american freedoms: "Anonymity is a shield from the tyranny of the majority. . . . It thus exemplifies the purpose behind the Bill of Rights and of the First Amendment in particular: to protect unpopular individuals from retaliation . . . at the hand of an intolerant society." (Cut from EFF.)
- throwthere 5y ago
  Agreed. Read any periodical from the 1600s onwards and you’ll see a lot of pen names. And to people who think discourse was more civil back then (sort of assuming that people were more responsible when being anonyminity)— they’re wrong. some of the most vile filth, slander and gossip was published.
  - mjreacher 5y ago
    Do you have any examples of such vile content that would be worse than what we see today?
    - falcrist 5y ago
      There was a particular instance where Thomas Jefferson called John Adams a hermaphrodite (via a supporter with a newspaper) [0]. Adams apparently responded by spreading a rumor that Jefferson was dead. I believe that technique was learned from Benjamin Franklin, who "predicted" the death of a rival almanac publisher. [1] There's much more in the way of antics among the founders of the US, but this isn't unique to them. Classical antiquity even has stories of some of the childish stuff that politicians got up to. EDIT to add example: IIRC Cicero accused Clodius of incest and a number of other things [2]. Clodius responded by accusing Cicero of acting as a tyrannical king while he was consul. Some of the insults don't hit the same today, but this is supposed to be seriously petty stuff. The Cicero example wasn't anonymous, of course, but then again anonymity in classical antiquity would have been a good way to make sure your story didn't survive to the modern day. Having said that, there are stories about some of the stuff that was written in graffiti in Rome. I'm not sure if I'd call any of this stuff "worse" or not, though there was more political violence in the ancient world. I guess it depends on what you include under the term "discourse". For what it's worth, the origins of our word "invective" apparently come from Latin [3][4]. Apropos if true. [0] - https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/are-presidential-campaigns-getting-nastier-not-really/hermaphroditical https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/are-presidenti... [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_Leeds?wprov=sfla1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_Leeds?wprov=sfla1 [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publius_Clodius_Pulcher#Sex_and_politics_in_the_late_Republic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publius_Clodius_Pulcher#Sex_an... [3] - https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/invective https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/invective [4] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invective https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invective
cpt1138 5y ago
On all these sites, including this one, why is the engagement model to comment on things? At family gatherings, prior to COVID, I always noticed real life chit chat to be bizarrely opinionated and biased as soon as it veered from the weather or traffic. What is the value we are getting from commenting, that makes it “worth it” to us to give up anonymity?
- ILMostro7 5y ago
  We are social animals Sense of gratification from reinforcing our understanding of an issue, our world Sense of accomplishment for being upvoted or proclaimed to be smart or even popular Appeasing a yearning to be noticed Short-sighted distractions to alleviate other pressures and hardships in daily life Making little etchings on cyber cave walls to mark that we were here Some other unknown reason that we may understand at a later time in history ... Thanks for the question, btw. It made me think more than I had anticipated
hunglee2 5y ago
the premise is clearly correct, the implementation could certainly be more nuanced however. Rather than a blanket ban on anonymous accounts, how about read only until you verify ID? Or perhaps some way to tar pitting posts based on the degree of authentication of the account? This way you can retain anonymity on sign up, but incentivise celebrity by increasing reach
- maxime_cb 5y ago
  OP here. I edited the post to make it crystal clear that I'm advocating against centralized e-IDs. The post is meant to read as a warning, not an encouragement to go in this direction. If you read this and you're feeling revulsed at the idea of a centralized license attached to your internet connection, good. You should be. I really hope this doesn't come to happen, but there has recently been an attempt by the Australian government to do just this: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20210405/23025046557/australian-government-proposes-stripping-internet-users-their-anonymity.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20210405/23025046557/austr... I didn't come up with the idea of centralized e-IDs, it was already out there. It's a terrible idea, but it's exactly the kind of solution governments could be likely to go for.
paulsutter 5y ago
> crypto-signed government ID is attached to your every internet connection No we need crypto-signed anonymous identifiers that establish a reputation over time. Weakness of online reputation is the problem, not the bots or spam.
- theshrike79 5y ago
  Inb4 "social score" =) We all watched that episode of Black Mirror.
jrochkind1 5y ago
After reading some of the all-bot https://www.reddit.com/r/SubSimulatorGPT2/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SubSimulatorGPT2/ that OP links to... many of the comments right here in this HN thread are starting to look like bots to me too. Have people actually sic'd bots on this thread, or am I just over-triggering now? Crap, now my own comment is starting to look like a bot to me. This may be a testament to the very low bar set by internet forum/social media discussion, maybe we humans all write uninspired generic word salad comments all the time.
- carapace 5y ago
  I commend https://xkcd.com/810/ https://xkcd.com/810/ to your attention. Bots or humans? It doesn't matter if the memetic fitness function selects for constructive signal.
josephcsible 5y ago
I'd rather have a permanent problem with fake news than force everyone to tie all of their online speech to government-issued IDs.
motohagiography 5y ago
Imo, the basic problem with how the internet has played out so far is that what began as a sparse network that required co-operation via some mutual dependency on things like a base level of competence and intelligence, collegiality, respect for certain individual boundaries like pseudonymity, and other conventions has, by making it user friendly, become a battle ground for people who are incapable of those necessary things. These are just eternal september problems. However, the necessary condition for all these kinds of total social surveillance controls is a network of authorities who have physical impunity from the people they ostensiby serve, govern, or rule, and I'd bet this decade will be defined by resolving that question of how far are they willing to go. We're already post-truth in public and political discourse, so there is no basis for mutual trust, and the real world conventions about basic freedoms have been largely recast as privileges, as though they are both somehow granted by critics and subject to their political schemes. Some very clever people are still trying to find alternatives to a civil confrontation that seems both catastrophic and inevitable, and they're doing it in the form of growing new platforms, cryptocurrencies, privacy and security technologies, energy storage and efficiency techs, even vulnerability research as a hedge, but what I can only now call the leviathanists are co-ordinating to bar any and all exits for people, and in particular minds, that would generate any value they cannot subdue and spend themselves. Indeed, meaningful anonymity is just probably just about done online, but what I don't think authorities understand is that they think people misbehave when they are anonymous. The trouble is, what they may be about to discover is that it was the anonymity that was the civility, and what is left without it is something altogether more serious.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  Large-scale social media platforms are far from "user friendly"; they're advertiser-friendly and influence-peddler-friendly. Big difference. True user friendliness is now to be sought in federated platforms (where you can pick a 'server' that follows your preferred policies) and niche-focused spaces like HN itself, where standards of competence (however defined), collegiality and respect can still be meaningfully enforced.
  - autoexec 5y ago
eternalban 5y ago
If the 'state' pushes for digital identification for access to networks, we have a golden opportunity to create a public key-exchange mechanism as public utility, as a component of the digital id. If followed up with robust ad-hoc distributed VPN services/platforms, there will possibility for creation of impenetrable (modulo algos & execution) private virtual spaces.
serverlessmom 5y ago
One of the singular greatest and most important aspects of online communities is the right to anonymity. If every poster were required to have a government ID attached to their online presence I worry that many of the people who need access to online communities the most would be unable to participate in them. I don't know what the solution would be of course, but I'm tempted to pitch the idea of a "trust worthiness" score attached to users that functions somewhat like karma. Of course currently there's no practical and certainly no bias-free way to evaluate the massive amount of information being posted daily. There's also no way to guarantee that the majority of people would trust such a system nor that they are willing to verify any of the information they consume and readily spread.
- verisimi 5y ago
  Not to mention, how easy it would be for the government or its employees to destroy lives, by planting false evidence. If you have access to the system you would be able to destroy lives with just a few keystrokes.
  - serverlessmom 5y ago
    That is certainly a chilling thought and definitely not an unlikely turn of events. Society seems to need some level of governance in order to function, but who can we trust to govern for the people and not turn to tyranny? Technology is such a beacon of light for advancement but also so dangerous in the wrong hands.
jodrellblank 5y ago
> "The rise of bots could render many online communities simply uninhabitable." Is that uninhabitable in the sense "nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded"? Why would people make bots to post online comment threads, if not to attract real people? And why would real people go there if it wasn't interesting or enjoyable or clickbait rage-engaging? And why would Governments be interested in stopping you engaging with bots, anymore than they stop you engaging with fiction books or fiction TV or playing video games against computer characters, etc?
- maxime_cb 5y ago
  > And why would Governments be interested in stopping you engaging with bots, anymore than they stop you engaging with fiction books or fiction TV or playing video games against computer characters, etc? Because they're afraid that foreign actors (or other bad actors) will try to systematically influence online discourse to manipulate public perception. That could mean affecting the result of elections or just fuelling the fire when it comes to political disagreements. If they do come for online anonymity, they'll use the same old rhetoric that they're doing this to protect you, to protect the children, etc. Here's an article about the Australian government trying to do precisely this: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20210405/23025046557/australian-government-proposes-stripping-internet-users-their-anonymity.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20210405/23025046557/austr...
froh 5y ago
Does the HN hive mind have pointers to some kind of trusted pseudonymity infrastructure? Something along the lines of a network of pseudonym issuing authorities, which allow two things: Individuals can generate pseudonyms and use them to act online to their heart's content. However some kind of nuanced "reputation" is propagated back through the network and is "sticky" to the entity behind their pseudonyms. As reputation is relative, the evaluation needs to be relative to the crowd you interact with. And the big big challenge is to protect the real life individual, so the pseudonym can only ever be uncloaked by the individual themselves. Is that possible at all? Where are the communities researching about this?
- drexlspivey 5y ago
  check out keybase.io
  - Tistron 5y ago
    keybase seemed so incredibly promising to me with some really cool features. the company was bought by zoom though, right? and the team tasked with fixing the encryption of zoom calls. Does anyone know what is expected to happen to the keybase software and infrastructure?
jugglinmike 5y ago
> Maybe there is a way to build a new web, a new kind of social media using a > hash graph to implement a decentralized web of trust, something that can > allow content verification without forcing everyone to sacrifice their right > to remain anonymous online. Comparisons to OpenGPG are likely to make anyone cringe, but if you're willing to suspend disbelief about the usability issues, it seems like such an apt metaphor. Where signing a key is vouching for the owner's humanity, not their identity. I can imagine websites integrating my browser to attach a "humanity key" to the content I post, and my browser maintaining my collection of keys and my preferences for divulging them. Granted, pseudonymity is not the same as anonymity. Maybe if the meaning (and lifespan?) behind these keys was constrained, then they could be sufficiently disposable to approximate anonymity. This system is either fundamentally flawed or already implemented, but I don't know how determine which. Can anyone here share writing along these lines?
- dane-pgp 5y ago
  "Proof of humanity" is an active area of research, and there are several attempts at it out there. One that's worth looking at is BrightID[0] (although some people might be put off by it being blockchain-adjacent, in that it uses a DAO as part of its consensus-building system). As for the difference between pseudonymity and anonymity, it's worth noting that once everyone has a cryptographic identity, we can start layering on clever things like zero-knowledge proofs, for example, which would allow people to issue themselves new pseudonyms that carry the same level of trust as their core identity, without ever revealing what that core identity is (or which other accounts vouched for the core identity to give it that level of trust). [0] https://www.brightid.org/ https://www.brightid.org/
d0gsg0w00f 5y ago
I think that people have pretty good BS detectors built in. If online communities start to get a funny smell they'll just double down on their small trusted in-person networks. We're already seeing this in smaller WhatsApp, Discord, Slack, Group Text communities. Anyone who thinks that a Twitter or Facebook thread is "real talk" is just fooling themselves. The promise of the internet to break down barriers has backfired and the social walls have just just gotten higher.

73 points by vmoore 5y ago

This is from 2019. The author says fake content is going to be too hard to identify so there is only one effective way to stop it, and that is to verify that everyone who posts content is in fact human. And that least to the end of anonymity. " Ultimately, one possibility is that online platforms will begin requiring a verified government ID in order to register. We could even end up living in a world where a kind of “e-passport”, crypto-signed government ID is attached to your every internet connection, and tracked everywhere online."

baremetal 5y ago
not sure how that would stop misuse and abuse on the internet. not like the bad guys are suddenly going to respect the law.
- JauntyHatAngle 5y ago
  That's a rather handwavey statement. The hypothetical presented is essentially a highly regulated walled garden. "Bad guys" would be blocked or cited. If all content is tied to an ID, yes it would work. China has shown that for the most part you can regulate the majority of discourse in an online space if you wall it off to the bit you control. Not sure how this is different. Not that I agree with it. Not a fan of the suggestion myself.
  - mtgx 5y ago
    you're assuming that those IDs can't be forged. Pretty big assumprion. When in history has existed an id or authentication method that couldn't be forged or broken?
  - yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
    And Facebook has demonstrated that requiring real identities doesn't stop misinformation at all.
    - JauntyHatAngle 5y ago
      The question was bots and controlling discourse, not misinformation.
  - TigeriusKirk 5y ago
    If it's too hard to identify fake content, how do you identify bad guys, even if you know their IDs? What difference does it make what ID is attached to information if you can't identify it as fake? If you can identify it as fake, the whole premise evaporates.
    - piptastic 5y ago
      I don't think the premise evaporates. There's a solvable difference between checking an ID against a database of IDs you control, vs identifying the fakeness of any other piece of random information.
logicalmonster 5y ago
> The author says fake content is going to be too hard to identify so there is only one effective way to stop it I strongly disagree with the author that there's only one effective way to stop misinformation. Remember, the real problem isn't the existence or proliferation of misinformation, which is both incredibly subjective and impossible to prevent without a central source of truth which is fraught with ethical problems. The problem is that many people uncritically believe anything they read, see, or hear. You could solve the actual problem of misinformation tomorrow if there was a concerted societal messaging that said something like the following: "Everything you read online, from any source, may be inaccurate. People with money and power try and manipulate you for even more money and power. Verify everything with multiple sources, consider all possibilities and peoples' motives, and use your brain." This will never happen because powerful people want to have their cake and eat it too: politicians want you to believe all of the words that come out of their mouth, but not trust the naughty "conspiracy theories" about them being insider traders, for instance.
- yissp 5y ago
  I think everybody already knows that you shouldn't trust anonymous, un-sourced information you read online, and I doubt simply reminding them of this would do much good. It's just really hard to constantly be vigilant. Even on this site, I've caught myself casually reading an article or comment and taking the claims at face-value, and then reading a response that actually does cite reputable sources showing it was complete bull-shit.
  - logicalmonster 5y ago
    > everybody already knows that you shouldn't trust anonymous, un-sourced information you read online * Your comment makes no sense in light of the establishment freaking out about "misinformation" online. If everybody already knew what not to trust, then why are they freaking out about misinformation spreading wildly on social media? * You yourself claim that you find yourself believing unsourced claims at face value, so there's a contradiction there too. I thought you already knew what you shouldn't trust. * There is no definitive source of truth that exists. Even if something is sourced by a "verified source", it can be false information, if even just by lying by omission. CNN, Fox News, Snopes, all politicians, and Facebook's fact checkers get things wrong or tell falsehoods. Trusting an "official source" is not a prescription to avoiding misinformation.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

superkuh 5y ago

Platforms can do anything they want and most already do require real name verification. But platforms are only the tiny, centralized, commercial part of online. There are vast expanses of niche communities and individual's webservers out there that will never require anything like that.

sharikous 5y ago
They could easily be forced to by some law
- smitty1e 5y ago
  Laws can be written to do anything, including repealing gravity. But if there is no enforcement mechanism, then all the lawmakerd achieve is diluting their credibility. We need to ask if any freshy anonymity law (no matter the content) is an improvement. Because bad law will worsen the issue that it attempts to address.

Cynddl 5y ago

> We could even end up living in a world where a kind of “e-passport”, crypto-signed government ID is attached to your every internet connection, and tracked everywhere online. […] The rise of bots could render many online communities simply uninhabitable. > We are moving towards a model where the internet is dominated by a few centralized content providers and their walled gardens, and generated content may unfortunately make it even harder for grassroots online communities to survive and grow. The author makes a good and fair analysis of the situation, yet I don't see how advocating for e-IDs is going to make the Internet a better place. This is a very ‘platform-focused’ critique that assume that the Internet tends toward more centralisation, where communities are packed together in massive platforms that regulate who communicates to whom and how. Where do we see a need to regulate ‘fake news’ and artificially generated content? Facebook Pages? Twitter? Youtube? These are all hyper-global platforms focused on content monetization. On the other hand, local Facebook groups and the feed of your friends, Github repositories, Mastodon… may not face the same future. Maybe there's a lesson to learn here?

tomrod 5y ago
It's FUD. So long as applications in any form can connect to an internet, people can route around The Internet. Gopher as an example shows that alternative protocols can be created outside the modern approach. Mesh networking as well.
maxime_cb 5y ago
OP here. Surprised to see an old blog post resurface like this. Just to be clear, I am not in favor of a centralized e-ID type of system. I think that would be a very ugly world to live in. I don't think that an e-ID is a good thing. This is why I talk about a web of trust at the end of the post. We need a better solution that doesn't rely on centralized control. > On the other hand, local Facebook groups and the feed of your friends, Github repositories, Mastodon… may not face the same future. Maybe there's a lesson to learn here? The way I see it, right now, bots are just not capable enough and it's not cost effective enough to try to gain access to these smaller communities. Facebook is a prime target because a single account gains you access to billions of users. That makes it worthwhile to farm out account creation to actual humans. I do think smaller and more niche platforms will probably always be less subject to influence, but, there's money and power to be gained by influencing public opinion on any platform. So it's just a matter of time. Eventually there will be bots that are smart enough to create an account on any platform without human supervision and that are much less heavy handed and obvious. These bots will be able to auto-generate profile pictures and play more of a "long game" in terms of gaining your trust.

wedn3sday 5y ago

I find the sentence, "right to remain anonymous online," intriguing. Since when do we have this right? Where is this right written, and who decided we had it? I wouldnt be at all surprised if a poll of the HN community found that we all thought that we had (or should have) this right, but when did we all collectively make that decision? Since some time around 2014 I've been advocating in private around the issue of automated inanity engines and their rise to prominence. IMO online anonymity does more harm then good right now, and we still havent seen the full power of things like GPT-3 in the hands of nation state actors (or maybe we have and just dont know it).

tkot 5y ago
I guess the same question could be asked in the opposite direction, so to speak - isn't a belief that such a right exists enough for it to exist, even if it's unwritten?
medo-bear 5y ago
if things are unregulated then online anonymity comes naturally. on the other hand, it is anti-anonymity that is unnatural because it needs to be enforced. so no one needed to decide we have the right to anonymity, but "someone" is trying to decide that we don't have that right
- shadowgovt 5y ago
  > if things are unregulated then online anonymity comes naturally. I think that, unfortunately, this statement is a bit too strong. An unregulated world doesn't stop private actors from pseudonymously using resources and lying about themselves, of course, but it also doesn't stop owners of network fabric or service providers comparing log data to de-pseudonymize a user. In the absence of regulation, the predominant factor is just what people want to do.
  - medo-bear 5y ago
    my point is that option of anonymity comes naturally, as opposed to someone needing to grant you that right. privacy is also a natural right, yet nothing stops anyone from putting an eat to your bedroom door, so to speak

agumonkey 5y ago

In a situation like that, the system cannot sustain itself.. it will have to crash I believe.

sandworm101 5y ago

>> Since when do we have this right? [...] but when did we all collectively make that decision? December 15th, 1791. As explained by SCOTUS as recently as 1995 (McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Commission) anonymous speech is baked into the first amendment, putting it at the core of american freedoms: "Anonymity is a shield from the tyranny of the majority. . . . It thus exemplifies the purpose behind the Bill of Rights and of the First Amendment in particular: to protect unpopular individuals from retaliation . . . at the hand of an intolerant society." (Cut from EFF.)

throwthere 5y ago
Agreed. Read any periodical from the 1600s onwards and you’ll see a lot of pen names. And to people who think discourse was more civil back then (sort of assuming that people were more responsible when being anonyminity)— they’re wrong. some of the most vile filth, slander and gossip was published.
- mjreacher 5y ago
  Do you have any examples of such vile content that would be worse than what we see today?
  - falcrist 5y ago
    There was a particular instance where Thomas Jefferson called John Adams a hermaphrodite (via a supporter with a newspaper) [0]. Adams apparently responded by spreading a rumor that Jefferson was dead. I believe that technique was learned from Benjamin Franklin, who "predicted" the death of a rival almanac publisher. [1] There's much more in the way of antics among the founders of the US, but this isn't unique to them. Classical antiquity even has stories of some of the childish stuff that politicians got up to. EDIT to add example: IIRC Cicero accused Clodius of incest and a number of other things [2]. Clodius responded by accusing Cicero of acting as a tyrannical king while he was consul. Some of the insults don't hit the same today, but this is supposed to be seriously petty stuff. The Cicero example wasn't anonymous, of course, but then again anonymity in classical antiquity would have been a good way to make sure your story didn't survive to the modern day. Having said that, there are stories about some of the stuff that was written in graffiti in Rome. I'm not sure if I'd call any of this stuff "worse" or not, though there was more political violence in the ancient world. I guess it depends on what you include under the term "discourse". For what it's worth, the origins of our word "invective" apparently come from Latin [3][4]. Apropos if true. [0] - https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/are-presidential-campaigns-getting-nastier-not-really/hermaphroditical https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/are-presidenti... [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_Leeds?wprov=sfla1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_Leeds?wprov=sfla1 [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publius_Clodius_Pulcher#Sex_and_politics_in_the_late_Republic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publius_Clodius_Pulcher#Sex_an... [3] - https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/invective https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/invective [4] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invective https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invective

cpt1138 5y ago

On all these sites, including this one, why is the engagement model to comment on things? At family gatherings, prior to COVID, I always noticed real life chit chat to be bizarrely opinionated and biased as soon as it veered from the weather or traffic. What is the value we are getting from commenting, that makes it “worth it” to us to give up anonymity?

ILMostro7 5y ago
We are social animals Sense of gratification from reinforcing our understanding of an issue, our world Sense of accomplishment for being upvoted or proclaimed to be smart or even popular Appeasing a yearning to be noticed Short-sighted distractions to alleviate other pressures and hardships in daily life Making little etchings on cyber cave walls to mark that we were here Some other unknown reason that we may understand at a later time in history ... Thanks for the question, btw. It made me think more than I had anticipated

hunglee2 5y ago

the premise is clearly correct, the implementation could certainly be more nuanced however. Rather than a blanket ban on anonymous accounts, how about read only until you verify ID? Or perhaps some way to tar pitting posts based on the degree of authentication of the account? This way you can retain anonymity on sign up, but incentivise celebrity by increasing reach

maxime_cb 5y ago
OP here. I edited the post to make it crystal clear that I'm advocating against centralized e-IDs. The post is meant to read as a warning, not an encouragement to go in this direction. If you read this and you're feeling revulsed at the idea of a centralized license attached to your internet connection, good. You should be. I really hope this doesn't come to happen, but there has recently been an attempt by the Australian government to do just this: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20210405/23025046557/australian-government-proposes-stripping-internet-users-their-anonymity.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20210405/23025046557/austr... I didn't come up with the idea of centralized e-IDs, it was already out there. It's a terrible idea, but it's exactly the kind of solution governments could be likely to go for.

paulsutter 5y ago

> crypto-signed government ID is attached to your every internet connection No we need crypto-signed anonymous identifiers that establish a reputation over time. Weakness of online reputation is the problem, not the bots or spam.

theshrike79 5y ago
Inb4 "social score" =) We all watched that episode of Black Mirror.

jrochkind1 5y ago

After reading some of the all-bot https://www.reddit.com/r/SubSimulatorGPT2/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SubSimulatorGPT2/ that OP links to... many of the comments right here in this HN thread are starting to look like bots to me too. Have people actually sic'd bots on this thread, or am I just over-triggering now? Crap, now my own comment is starting to look like a bot to me. This may be a testament to the very low bar set by internet forum/social media discussion, maybe we humans all write uninspired generic word salad comments all the time.

carapace 5y ago
I commend https://xkcd.com/810/ https://xkcd.com/810/ to your attention. Bots or humans? It doesn't matter if the memetic fitness function selects for constructive signal.

josephcsible 5y ago

I'd rather have a permanent problem with fake news than force everyone to tie all of their online speech to government-issued IDs.

motohagiography 5y ago

Imo, the basic problem with how the internet has played out so far is that what began as a sparse network that required co-operation via some mutual dependency on things like a base level of competence and intelligence, collegiality, respect for certain individual boundaries like pseudonymity, and other conventions has, by making it user friendly, become a battle ground for people who are incapable of those necessary things. These are just eternal september problems. However, the necessary condition for all these kinds of total social surveillance controls is a network of authorities who have physical impunity from the people they ostensiby serve, govern, or rule, and I'd bet this decade will be defined by resolving that question of how far are they willing to go. We're already post-truth in public and political discourse, so there is no basis for mutual trust, and the real world conventions about basic freedoms have been largely recast as privileges, as though they are both somehow granted by critics and subject to their political schemes. Some very clever people are still trying to find alternatives to a civil confrontation that seems both catastrophic and inevitable, and they're doing it in the form of growing new platforms, cryptocurrencies, privacy and security technologies, energy storage and efficiency techs, even vulnerability research as a hedge, but what I can only now call the leviathanists are co-ordinating to bar any and all exits for people, and in particular minds, that would generate any value they cannot subdue and spend themselves. Indeed, meaningful anonymity is just probably just about done online, but what I don't think authorities understand is that they think people misbehave when they are anonymous. The trouble is, what they may be about to discover is that it was the anonymity that was the civility, and what is left without it is something altogether more serious.

zozbot234 5y ago
Large-scale social media platforms are far from "user friendly"; they're advertiser-friendly and influence-peddler-friendly. Big difference. True user friendliness is now to be sought in federated platforms (where you can pick a 'server' that follows your preferred policies) and niche-focused spaces like HN itself, where standards of competence (however defined), collegiality and respect can still be meaningfully enforced.
- autoexec 5y ago

eternalban 5y ago

If the 'state' pushes for digital identification for access to networks, we have a golden opportunity to create a public key-exchange mechanism as public utility, as a component of the digital id. If followed up with robust ad-hoc distributed VPN services/platforms, there will possibility for creation of impenetrable (modulo algos & execution) private virtual spaces.

serverlessmom 5y ago

One of the singular greatest and most important aspects of online communities is the right to anonymity. If every poster were required to have a government ID attached to their online presence I worry that many of the people who need access to online communities the most would be unable to participate in them. I don't know what the solution would be of course, but I'm tempted to pitch the idea of a "trust worthiness" score attached to users that functions somewhat like karma. Of course currently there's no practical and certainly no bias-free way to evaluate the massive amount of information being posted daily. There's also no way to guarantee that the majority of people would trust such a system nor that they are willing to verify any of the information they consume and readily spread.

verisimi 5y ago
Not to mention, how easy it would be for the government or its employees to destroy lives, by planting false evidence. If you have access to the system you would be able to destroy lives with just a few keystrokes.
- serverlessmom 5y ago
  That is certainly a chilling thought and definitely not an unlikely turn of events. Society seems to need some level of governance in order to function, but who can we trust to govern for the people and not turn to tyranny? Technology is such a beacon of light for advancement but also so dangerous in the wrong hands.

jodrellblank 5y ago

> "The rise of bots could render many online communities simply uninhabitable." Is that uninhabitable in the sense "nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded"? Why would people make bots to post online comment threads, if not to attract real people? And why would real people go there if it wasn't interesting or enjoyable or clickbait rage-engaging? And why would Governments be interested in stopping you engaging with bots, anymore than they stop you engaging with fiction books or fiction TV or playing video games against computer characters, etc?

maxime_cb 5y ago
> And why would Governments be interested in stopping you engaging with bots, anymore than they stop you engaging with fiction books or fiction TV or playing video games against computer characters, etc? Because they're afraid that foreign actors (or other bad actors) will try to systematically influence online discourse to manipulate public perception. That could mean affecting the result of elections or just fuelling the fire when it comes to political disagreements. If they do come for online anonymity, they'll use the same old rhetoric that they're doing this to protect you, to protect the children, etc. Here's an article about the Australian government trying to do precisely this: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20210405/23025046557/australian-government-proposes-stripping-internet-users-their-anonymity.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20210405/23025046557/austr...

froh 5y ago

Does the HN hive mind have pointers to some kind of trusted pseudonymity infrastructure? Something along the lines of a network of pseudonym issuing authorities, which allow two things: Individuals can generate pseudonyms and use them to act online to their heart's content. However some kind of nuanced "reputation" is propagated back through the network and is "sticky" to the entity behind their pseudonyms. As reputation is relative, the evaluation needs to be relative to the crowd you interact with. And the big big challenge is to protect the real life individual, so the pseudonym can only ever be uncloaked by the individual themselves. Is that possible at all? Where are the communities researching about this?

drexlspivey 5y ago
check out keybase.io
- Tistron 5y ago
  keybase seemed so incredibly promising to me with some really cool features. the company was bought by zoom though, right? and the team tasked with fixing the encryption of zoom calls. Does anyone know what is expected to happen to the keybase software and infrastructure?

jugglinmike 5y ago

> Maybe there is a way to build a new web, a new kind of social media using a > hash graph to implement a decentralized web of trust, something that can > allow content verification without forcing everyone to sacrifice their right > to remain anonymous online. Comparisons to OpenGPG are likely to make anyone cringe, but if you're willing to suspend disbelief about the usability issues, it seems like such an apt metaphor. Where signing a key is vouching for the owner's humanity, not their identity. I can imagine websites integrating my browser to attach a "humanity key" to the content I post, and my browser maintaining my collection of keys and my preferences for divulging them. Granted, pseudonymity is not the same as anonymity. Maybe if the meaning (and lifespan?) behind these keys was constrained, then they could be sufficiently disposable to approximate anonymity. This system is either fundamentally flawed or already implemented, but I don't know how determine which. Can anyone here share writing along these lines?

dane-pgp 5y ago
"Proof of humanity" is an active area of research, and there are several attempts at it out there. One that's worth looking at is BrightID[0] (although some people might be put off by it being blockchain-adjacent, in that it uses a DAO as part of its consensus-building system). As for the difference between pseudonymity and anonymity, it's worth noting that once everyone has a cryptographic identity, we can start layering on clever things like zero-knowledge proofs, for example, which would allow people to issue themselves new pseudonyms that carry the same level of trust as their core identity, without ever revealing what that core identity is (or which other accounts vouched for the core identity to give it that level of trust). [0] https://www.brightid.org/ https://www.brightid.org/

d0gsg0w00f 5y ago

I think that people have pretty good BS detectors built in. If online communities start to get a funny smell they'll just double down on their small trusted in-person networks. We're already seeing this in smaller WhatsApp, Discord, Slack, Group Text communities. Anyone who thinks that a Twitter or Facebook thread is "real talk" is just fooling themselves. The promise of the internet to break down barriers has backfired and the social walls have just just gotten higher.