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Facebook, Google other tech firms must verify identities under proposed UK law

108 points by LordAtlas 5y ago

cute_boi 5y ago
I think I like this rule in a sense that it will stop intolerant people from creating mess. This is also one reason I left Reddit. However, this also means people wont be vocal and you can't say anything against fascist government. https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dictatorship-of-the-small-minority-3f1f83ce4e15 https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...
- MrBuddyCasino 5y ago
  Wondering which is more important - not being called a douchebag online or the gradual death of free speech. Impossible to say.
- decremental 5y ago
  I can't stand places filled with people preoccupied with things like tolerance and inclusion. Not because I think those things are bad, but because those people always turn out to be insufferable and often insane. Worrying about fascism in this context is extremely ironic given how things are playing out in the west in the name of tolerance and inclusion. The future is not looking very bright. By the way, I realize that just by expressing this opinion I am now a nazi.
  - jlcoff 5y ago
  - aww_dang 5y ago
    There's nothing more alienating than the allegedly "inclusive" environments. These are the places where I'm accused of racism (against myself?) or being a Russian. It isn't xenophobic when they do it. In the next breath they'll celebrate the noblesse oblige of their guilt. These are the places where individual agency is dismissed. My own experience of pulling myself up by my bootstraps is debunked as a fiction. Is there anything more alienating than being told you do not exist? Yes, I cannot wait to use my real name in these places. What a great opportunity for further harassment from these "inclusive" and "tolerant" people who cannot tolerate dissent or experiences which run counter to their "compassionate" ideologies. Up is down. Liberal is restrictive. Inclusive is alienating. https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/the-lonely-work-of-moderating-hacker-news#:~:text=He%20and%20Gackle%20have%20discussed%20diversifying%20their%20team%2C%20and%20adding%20a%20third%20moderator%20who%20is%20non%2Dwhite%2C%20non%2Dmale%2C%20and%2C%20Bell%20joked%2C%20%E2%80%9Cnon%2Dbalding.%E2%80%9D%20Gackle%20clarified%3A%20%E2%80%9CWe%27ve%20talked%20to%20each%20other%20about%20that.%20But%20we%20wouldn%27t%20make%20it%20a%20requirement.%E2%80%9D https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/th...
- dpratt 5y ago
  Just because you judge other people's opinions as 'intolerant' does not excuse support for forcibly revealing anonymity. At the very least, consider the possibility that opinions that you express that are considered widely popular and 'acceptable' today are likely to be viewed as 'hateful' or 'harmful' in the future. Any weapon you wish to use can easily be turned against you, and if we've learned anything from history, it's nearly certain that it will be.
  - cute_boi 5y ago
    Maybe there is a way to enforce integrity without revealing anonymity like phone number, credit card number without revealing personal identity or some trusted third party who can verify the identity during registration? I just want to say nobody should be able to get away by posting atrocious things, scams etc.
- tehbeard 5y ago
  Doxing 2.0, now government approved!
  - spansoa 5y ago
    Doxing needs to be /difficult/ though. It can't be super easy to unmask identities online. Law enforcement with probable cause need to subpoena services like Facebook, Reddit, etc to get dirt on people. Otherwise social media will be a sanitized, boring hellscape.
- simion314 5y ago
  >I think I like this rule in a sense that it will stop intolerant people from creating mess. T There could be better solutions then sending your ID to Facebook. Like limit posting or sharing for accounts that you suspect are bots, apply the terms of service if the post is against that, put limits on new accounts so their posts don't spread.
  - cute_boi 5y ago
    Why do you think facebook etc. doesn't try to limit posting etc? They already enforce such step. But when somebody pays these trolls to create new account and spread intolerance what can you do? These are not bots but a real people hired using pennies to spread misinformation.
    - simion314 5y ago
      How does a troll "spread" stuff ? FB does the spreading with the algorithm right? Am I missing something? What I see on FB is people I know share/like dubious shit like "Japan made microwaves oven illegal" , the original "troll" did not put this one my home page, people did not directly sent me that shit, FB decided "let me show this guy that the other guy seen and like this shit article on some other guy page", FB done all the spreading and even if FB had my and all my friends IDs it would not have stopped this stupid shit appeared on my wall (everyone has their real names and birth place, education, family relations setup in FB)
BitwiseFool 5y ago
I value anonymity for several reasons, not the least of which is the fact that what is acceptable today might possibly become intolerable in the future.
- bil7 5y ago
  presented with this position, many tech users would claim this doesn't apply to them
  - pixl97 5y ago
    It turns out that many tech users are idiots. It also turns out they get very mad when you tell them that and will go on a 10 minute autoriatrian rant on why you are wrong.
    - bil7 5y ago
      most people get mad if you call them an idiot. You can teach them truths about tech without insulting them
      - pixl97 5y ago
        You can't teach a right person nuthin'. It's only when a person is suspect in their conviction they are open to accept new information.
swader999 5y ago
Social credit well on it's way world wide.
- spansoa 5y ago
  `Let us scan your retina before you upload this meme`
- MrYellowP 5y ago
  - dang 5y ago
    Could you please stop posting unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments to Hacker News? You've been doing a ton of both lately and we ban that sort of account, regardless of whatever your views on the topics are, because it destroys what HN is supposed to be for. We want curious conversation here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
hyper_reality 5y ago
I still remember the days when almost everyone on Internet forums used pseudonyms and closely guarded their identities. It was even taught in schools not to reveal who you are online. Google, FB and other tech giants changed the norms around this completely for most Internet users. Once these platforms realised it was easier to monetise their users, and control abuse when dealing with real identities, they pushed hard for verified accounts (e.g. Google Plus) even though this is antithetical to the founding ideas of cyberspace. Today we have two Internets, one where anonymity is still possible but you can reveal your true name if you want (e.g. HN), and another of walled gardens with verified identities. The UK government is proposing to enshrine the fully identified concept of the Internet into law. While this will prevent some abuse it's a sad reflection on how some of the early values of cyberspace have been lost, where people could be who they wanted to be, and freely discuss topics they might not wish to have associated with their real names forever. Politicians whose main interaction with the Internet is through their Twitter accounts just don't get that.
- ehutch79 5y ago
  It's a matter of scale i think. In small communities, you're not really anonymous in the same way as on facebook. You might only be known as DataDog213 on some forum with a hundred members, but the people there know you and who you are as a person. In facebook groups with thousands of members with no real bar or entry, you're really anonymous and no more distinctive than anyone else if you don't make yourself stand out. (By bar of entry, I mean things like even finding the site in the first place)
  - smorgusofborg 5y ago
    I'm not really seeing that difference in requirements. Most of the forums were trivial to find in all sorts of Google searches, allowing thousands of people to create a new unique account, and then get banned for violating the pinned rules about asking a question by one of the <100 users that could be recognized as being a repeated chat mate on the one forum. Many of those obsessives on one forum would never be findable somewhere else where they might not have been an expert. I find it a bit sad that thousands of people are on FB using their real names and turning person who says stupid things about several different hobbies into a permanent part of their own fairly permanent identity and I don't actually see how it helps anything. But maybe people who don't find it creepy see something I don't.
Bancakes 5y ago
It's always the UK. When will they get a clue and make their own nannyware? China does it. Russia does it.
- CommanderData 5y ago
  We don't want it but we'll continue to elect those who push these laws. The British vote against their interests and we laugh about it satiricaly on late night shows.
spansoa 5y ago
I got scared reading this headline, and then realized this is the UK only. I really hope other countries don't copy the UK's draconian and Orwellian technology practices. Anonymity is a cyberspace birthright. I really don't want my dearest thoughts attached to my legal name forever. With enough digging you could probably unearth my real name, but policy like this just makes it trivial to do. The cyberspace ideal is to make it hard for people to know the person behind a piece of text online. The friction of unearthing a real identity needs to be enshrined in Internet Law. Make law enforcement do the extra work of unmasking identities. We can't make it easy for them.
- Mindwipe 5y ago
  The (insane) UK trade industry body for Age Verification providers believes every site on the internet should be forced to only carry content suitable for under 13s, or should block all access from VPNs in case anyone from the UK is using them. They also came out with the absolutely golden statement this week that it's not too bad that this would put vulnerable people in authoritarian countries at risk, because all we had to do was collapse the governments of Russia, China, much of Africa, Poland, Iran, sizable chunks of the Middle East etc etc. Problem solved!
  - mjevans 5y ago
    Why can't sites suitable FOR children opt in to saying they are, and then really prosecuting any website that makes this claim but is false? Then use already built in platform controls to restrict accounts to these 'safe' sites. Just assume everything is unsafe by default, and also free and unrated by default.
- dazc 5y ago
  Your amazon account is likely already attached to your identity and I'm sure your google account and ip data could very easilly be used to pin point who you are. I'm not really disagreeing with you, in principal, just pointing out that this ship has already sailed for must of us.
  - 5y ago
micromacrofoot 5y ago
This is probably a very unpopular opinion, but the lack of anonymity could dramatically improve people's behaviour on Facebook. If we can't touch the algorithm, which we know at various points has been adjusted to promote anger and manipulate emotions, what else can be done? If the lack of anonymity on Facebook means people start deleting their Facebook accounts... this is also a good thing.
- quadrifoliate 5y ago
  It's a very unpopular opinion because the precedent set (compulsory ID verification for online stuff) is very much not worth the thing that you think you're getting (improved behavior in an online social network). Assume that tomorrow you started requiring compulsory ID verification for, say, entering public parks. It's possible that this would lead to some improvement in the general conditions of public parks. But you would still think of it as dystopian bullshit. This is the same.
  - micromacrofoot 5y ago
    Yeah but assume that public park with ID verification was previously filled with sewage. A sewage filled park is also quite dystopian. (if it's unclear, Facebook is the sewage filled park)
- anfogoat 5y ago
  > This is probably a very unpopular opinion, but the lack of anonymity could dramatically improve people's behaviour on Facebook. I don't think many people would disagree with that. What I disagree with is valuing privacy and internet freedoms so little that you'd be willing to sacrifice on those even the tiniest bit just so people behaved better on social media. And really, disagree is an overly tame word for it, and I couldn't overstate just how much so.
  - micromacrofoot 5y ago
    Right, but do you have privacy on Facebook anyway? Already seems like a lost cause in that realm.
CSMastermind 5y ago
I'll run counter to the crowd here. I think that real identity verification could be a very good thing for the internet if implemented correctly. It would raise the barrier to entry for misinformation campaigns conducted online and it would presumably make it harder to spam. I also think that there's a way you could have verification while still maintaining relatively anonymity on these sites (i.e.; I have to verify my identity with Google but I can post under a pseudonym with only Google being able to make the connection back to who I am as a person). Obviously there would still be situations where you'd want true anonymity but plenty of online forums like Reddit's askScience do their own verification of user credentials. It would be nice if there was a verification process in place with someone like Google where I could sign up for a forum I trust less like Reddit and verify I have a degree without revealing (to random Reddit mods) who I am. And this already plays out on age restricted sites on the internet. I buy tobacco products online sometimes and I have to verify with my real driver's license who I am. I'd actually prefer some government service that could do that verification on my behalf so I don't have to give my PII to every store I want to make a purchase from.
- pixl97 5y ago
  All fun and games till the sites leak who is behind your pseudonym. And you 100% know that your real ID linked information will be sold to advertisers... I mean 'business partners'. People will still steal ID's and link them to accounts. And requiring a telephone number for verification is even worse. I signed up for twitter, they asked for a #. I didn't and my account got locked. Two weeks later they had a data breach and leaked those number to the world. Many services have my information. I don't post my opinions to a single one of those. Please stop fulfilling the authoritarians wet dreams.
- bostik 5y ago
  > real identity verification could be a very good thing for the internet if implemented correctly. Considering all the edge cases and ill-informed/malicious second-order effects, I don't think it can be implemented correctly. You can never know when a particular group becomes an ostracised target of hate, with every public posting in their history used to smear and attack them, or used as justification to doxx them and have their entire families subjected to a torrent of torment. > I'd actually prefer some government service that could do that verification on my behalf so I don't have to give my PII to every store I want to make a purchase from. So something like BankID? Swedes and Danes on HN can probably air their gripes about that system.
wordsarelies 5y ago
So... Weibo, but the UK version.
graphpercolator 5y ago
"The government has also proposed measures that would force companies to filter out "legal but harmful" material" This isn't government censorship though. It is just a private company that can choose to comply with the law or not. Something something not censorship. Something something children!!
- MrYellowP 5y ago
- stjohnswarts 5y ago
  Looks like you got down voted for that. lol. HN never disappoints. Have my upvote. You are 100% correct. The UK and Australia (and to an extent the USA) have been looking enviously at the social credit rating that China has put in place and want to start installing the foundation of such a system in our countries, and we should fight it whenever we can and call it out for what it is.
_Algernon_ 5y ago
Fuck that.
MrYellowP 5y ago
mattlondon 5y ago
It is kinda sad that this sort of stuff keeps coming up again and again. Yet it is Twitter and Facebook again and again that are the breeding grounds for the abuse it seems. I guess the argument from Twitter et al is "oh if we ban a racist troll they just re-register a new account. Sorry nothing we can do!". Well thanks Twitter for trying to ignore the problem, now we end up with legislation like this proposal which will be a fuck-ton more hassle and more importantly chilling-effect than something simpler that probably could have been done earlier but no one could be fagged to do, like e.g. defaulting to allowlist-only messages, sentiment analysis leading to human moderation, IP-based blocks/cooldowns, rate-limiting, client fingerprinting, nipple/genital-detecting ML, reputation-before-posting type systems etc. Nah mate - nothing we can do! These damn trolls just totally outwit us here at <XX-billion dollar company> with hundreds/thousands of super-smart engineers every time they register a new account! It is unsolvable!
- BiteCode_dev 5y ago
  Besides, while twitter pretend not requiring a phone number to register, they effectively do. So they can do something, because trolls and bots are not that subtle, and can be detected, and ban is effective, because creating an account with a phone number is cheap, but not free.
- InCityDreams 5y ago
  "but no one could be fagged to do", could be really misinterpreted across the Atlantic, and possibly be a black mark against you in 'the future'..thank goodness for anonymity(!)
- HWR_14 5y ago
  > Well thanks Twitter for trying to ignore the problem, now we end up with legislation like this proposal which will be a fuck-ton more hassle And give Twitter valuable real world identities for their users. Forced on them by the government.
ukraineally 5y ago
This will be a fix coming to virtually every major country very soon. "Disinformation" and "Misinformation" and "hate" stuff is going to hit every country and it's not surprising how quick everyone has moved on this. Let me describe what just went down in Canada. A national catastrophe. If you disagree with my take, I'm happy to provide sources. We have a vaccine mandate disproportionately harming racial minorities, it's still in place. Why do Black Canadians not get vaccinated? Tuskegee? I don't know. Why do the indigenous? Maybe because the Canadian government has a history of experimenting on them? Ultimately doesn't matter as part of the discussion. We look to our 2 greatest allies, USA and UK. They had no mandates or at least had a roadmap to the end. We didn't have a roadmap and we just unemployed those people? There's legitimate cause for protest. This article can be my proof that the protest in Ottawa was diverse: https://thepostmillennial.com/jagmeet-singh-faces-backlash-after-accusing-truckers-of-white-supremacy https://thepostmillennial.com/jagmeet-singh-faces-backlash-a... The problem was that the Canadian media labelled the convoy as a bunch of nazis. there was literally only 1 nazi flag and there also just happened to have professional photographers following him? Was he even party of the convoy/protest? That was enough though, the hate convoy was fabricated. There's virtually no nazis and certainly no confederates in Canada. That's not our thing. Hell, the total protest size is estimated well above 100,000 people. Even if Canada has nazis, we don't have that many. Not once did Trudeau go talk to the protest. He refused because they were all a bunch of nazis with unacceptable views. The ottawa police couldn't do anything against their right to protest and it was big enough that Trudeau couldn't keep ignoring. People demanded action against these nazis before they overthrow the government. Trudeau deployed martial law and arrested the lawful protest. Those illegal nazis looking to overthrow the government! Trudeau in parliament even got to calling a Jewish MP a nazi for standing with swastikas. He even refused to apologize and doubled down later(a jewish liberal MP called her a nazi as well) Crushing dissent in Canada got denunciation by tons of good left-wing celebrities. Worse yet, the judge who is presiding over the court cases of these protesters is a liberal party candidate back in 2011. Clear conflict of interest. Right before the Ukraine invasion, Trudeau absolutely abruptly stopped all the name calling over night. He then spoke that there's a great need to start talking to your friends and family who have differing political views. Typical anti echo chamber stuff. This is the day he got briefed about Putin's invasion I am sure. He went from declaring martial law to revoking it in an instant. Baffling everyone. There's literally a Liberal senator who asserted "Honk Honk" actually stands for Heil Hitler. Absolute crazy person. Meanwhile Jordan peterson was having a heart attack online because he justly saw the tyranny of the government for what it was. The government did crush dissent. We do have political prisoners. This is a current catastrophe that hasn't been fixed at all. Attention went to Ukraine for good reason, but we have a nightmare still in Canada. This abrupt 180 on the national emergency, Trudeau baffled everyone. People said 'oh the polls are in', Nope. Polls are in, they havent budged. senate was going to vote against(they werent). the various global celebrities calling Trudeau out on his actions. Nope. Our PM just quietly admitted to it during the Ukraine sanctions speech, in his speech he said, and I paraphrase and taken out of context and ruined in every way, "for the past few weeks putin has been controlling the media" Putin has controlled the media for decades in Russia. This was an admission of Canadian media. The past few weeks have been the convoy. In fact, international media were fantastic. NYTimes put their political ideology aside and called Trudeau out. Round of applause for the NYtimes. In fact, the international media were generally pretty fair, many didnt agree with the point of the protest, but agreed the protest should continue. They went to the protest because the Canadian media labelled this protest as 100,000 strong nazis looking to overthrow the government. International media saw a fantastic story because Canadians are generally good people, but when they got boots on the ground... that's obviously not what they found. Putin made it clear: He was invading to denazify Ukraine. Ironically the amazing president of ukraine is jewish. But we heard this just recently didn't we... Who else just called a Jewish person a Nazi? No, Trudeau simply got disinformed to an extreme degree by Russian propaganda. His echo chamber told him everyone was a nazi. All this BS about nazis, systemic racism and all that crap is Putin. The journalists who have been pushing all this nazi crap are russian agents. In fact, this entire protest was covered by rt.com about 100x more than the CBC covered it. Fox news was like 50x more than the CBC. Other entities covered it about the same. I would bet good money that the RCMP and CSIS are investigating those journalists today. The world is about to pass laws to ban disinformation because it was clearly weaponized by Russia. However, we have an ongoing injustice here in Canada. I expect monday when parliament resumes Trudeau will offer that apology to Melissa Lantsman. I hope he elaborates on this more.
Kim_Bruning 5y ago
I guess it needs to be repeated often, but it is the weakest members of society who need anonymity the most. Banning anonymity won't stop online bullying or other misbehavior by itself. Meanwhile it outs people to the bullies and saves the bullies a lot of time wrt needing to dox their targets first. Granted, possibly forcing real names will make it easier to catch some bullies; but you won't catch all of them. Conversely you'll have removed an important safe harbor for their victims.
- nileshtrivedi 5y ago
  The followup question is: how do we prevent the powerful members of the society from abusing the anonymity (fake news, fake support, corruption, other kinds of sybil attacks) that is intended for the weakest ones?
  - vorpalhex 5y ago
    We teach people how to use the "block" button and think critically. That is the only solution that is compatible with human rights.
  - fuzzer37 5y ago
    Teach critical thinking? Not everything needs to be spoonfed to everyone all the time.
  - Kim_Bruning 5y ago
    You're not wrong. Everyone benefits from anonymity, including the bad guys. The problem is that the strong side still has many ways to bully people even without anonymity. On the other hand the weak side ends up with Nowhere To Hide. Something to take into account is that culture changes and people change, and some things are situational. Even if you're on the majority side here and now; doesn't mean you might not be on the 'undesirable' side sometime/someplace else.
- Barrin92 5y ago
  Not true at all. The weakest members of society benefit from acting collectively, anonymity is a great thing if you're trying to hide your fortune. Peter Thiel has more to gain from anonymity than a MeToo member. There's a reason why your address and taxes paid are public information in Sweden. Moving things into the public sphere, transparency, and protection by the law is what helps weak people. Anonymity is a tool of power, always has been.
ClumsyPilot 5y ago
Facebook, Twitter and the rest of this basket of deplorables will meet their reconing in every nation. The problem is not that they've created a spyware empire that has swindled the common man - the problem is that they've swindled politicians and whole countries. In their greed, they cultivated bot armies that deploy propaganda for corporations and political parties on their platforms. They've swinged laws and elections. And they raked in the profits. If they had kept it just to business and domestic politics, maybe they could get away with this. But in their arrogance they crossed the line - when Taliban got a twitter account that regulatrly gets into spats with the CIA one, and when Russian state got millions of bots pushing propaganda (and many others) You have to be breathtakingly arrogant or insanely stupid to think that Putin and the CIA will be playthings of your newsfeed. The 'free-market of the brain' finally pissed off the only force in the West that's valued above Capitalism, and that's Nationalism / National security. Their business will survive, but they will get cut down to size and never be the players they once were. It won't happen overnight, but I would not hodl their stock.
LightG 5y ago
This will usher in the end of Big Tech. At least for me personally. VPN at the ready. The UK government is the pinnacle of "If you haven't got anything to hide, you have nothing to worry about". Potential police state. The only reason it's not a total nightmare here is I'm sure the police are so underfunded that they couldn't take advantage of all this bullsh!t, even if they wanted to. This is effective "police state virtue signalling" to its hardcore supporters. Red meat to the dogs. It won't actually mean anything in practice. Obligatory: But that doesn't mean you give up your identity, for fear of a more resourced and/or different police/state apparatus in future.
- johncearls 5y ago
  > The only reason it's not a total nightmare here is I'm sure the police are so underfunded that they couldn't take advantage of all this bullsh!t, even if they wanted to. This actually makes it worse because this means it will selectively be used against "enemies" of the establishment. That and for select and well-publicized chilling effects.
ramesh31 5y ago
I think we will look back on this early era of technology with great nostalgia, as sort of a modern wild west. Where people 50 years from now will think "My god, could you really just get online and do whatever the hell you wanted with no consequences? How insane is that?", in the same way that we now think "My god, could you really just go out west and stake a claim of free land in Kansas for yourself? How insane is that?". As the boundary between the digital and physical world increasingly ceases to exist, I fully expect that we will eventually be required to provide full identification at the ISP level to access the web.
zmmmmm 5y ago
I see a lot of people discussing this as a negative for big tech, but to me it seems like the biggest gift governments could give them. Right now they either don't demand real identity or they have to justify in ways that try to hide their real intent - your real identity makes you a much cleaner and more valuable data point for monetisation and other user-hostile aims. If this passes they can just point the finger at government and blame them. Instead of people being outraged at Facebook for demanding a picture of their driver's license, Facebook will just be saying "Legal requirements in your country demand that we do this" and all the outrage will be directed at government. Unless politicians are smart enough to also propose a technical framework that prevents it happening, this seems like a boon for big tech.
vorpalhex 5y ago
> ..Minister Nadine Dorries in a statement. “People will now have more control over who can contact them and be able to stop the tidal wave of hate served up to them by rogue algorithms.” Did you catch it? The issue is the algorithm, not the anonymity. This is just an excuse to stretch the authoritarian muscle.
- stjohnswarts 5y ago
  Exactly get a taste of power and want more and more in a positive feedback loop. They see us all as children or sheep under their control, and they know better than us in all matters.
mindslight 5y ago
Why bother working on seizing Russian owned assets as reparations for an illegal war, when it's more convenient to use the moment to push totalitarianism onto your own population instead? After the initial rush of solidarity, crises always bring out the opportunistic scumbags.
ryan29 5y ago
I think trolling, misinformation, etc. are big problems, but forcing everyone to use their real identities online is a mistake. I see several problems with it. First, you take away people's ability to learn how to be a good participant by using a low value identity. I did this a lot when I was younger and I think it's extremely important for kids and young adults to have the option of throwing away their identity to start over. Think of it like bankruptcy for your reputation. I used a pseudonym when I first started participating on open source bug trackers and mailing lists. I think it turns out that I was doing a good job of participating even though I was a bit unsure of myself, but I still think it was a good idea to leave myself the option of abandoning that identity. When I started using my real name I was concerned about tarnishing my permanent reputation, so I was always careful with things I said. I think that's helped me become a much better participant. I never talk politics, I wait a day to post if I'm frustrated, I say please and thank you, and I don't contradict project members unless I can back it up with a provable test case (or qualify it with "in my opinion", etc. if it's subjective). Second, you're not going to eliminate misinformation if it's propaganda from a nation-state. At that point there's nothing stopping them from creating new identities as needed and those identities will be more valuable because everyone will be operating under the false assumption they're dealing with a natural person with a verified identity. You could force everyone to use their real legal name in an attempt to help people distinguish nationalities, but the appropriateness of that approach is a debate on its own and there's nothing that says a person from the US or UK can't have a Russian or Chinese name. What's next? Are we going to make people participate with their full legal name and address? Third, you'll create an opportunity for someone else to capture the social media markets by building a better system that doesn't require identity verification. People will take the path of least resistance. That's why YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc. got popular. They were easy to use. I'm from Canada. Why would I subject myself to identity verification to use a (foreign) US platform if there's a competing (foreign) Chinese platform that doesn't ask for my photo ID and a face scan? Opening the door for China or Russia to build competing systems is a bad idea if you're from a western country and a welcome opportunity if you're not. I think there's value in oversight and regulation and, since I'm from Canada, I always favor services that have Canadian regulators (FINTRAC, CRTC, CIRA etc.). However, that's only for things involving money and that I consider valuable (financial accounts, phone numbers, domains). I'm not sure if I'd choose a Canadian regulated social media platform that requires my government ID over a foreign competitor that doesn't if I don't attribute any value to the account / profile.
Havoc 5y ago
>People will now have more control over who can contact them and be able to stop the tidal wave of hate served up to them by rogue algorithms. No, it'll strip UK people of the safety of online anonymity and do nothing about said hate, trolls and fake accounts still flooding in from the other 194 countries/corners of the internet. UK has been on a rather ominous surveillance state trip lately.
stjohnswarts 5y ago
lol 10% of their global revenue? I don't think I've ever heard a bill that is more dead on arrival. Google will never operate in a country with those kinds of penalties and MPs know that.
stjohnswarts 5y ago
From the country that brought you 1984 and the Magna Carta: 100% Surveillance Society. Shame on you UK. "Think of the children!" I am; I am thinking of them living in a free society.
hiimshort 5y ago
Distressing to say the least. I'm sure plenty of people would agree that these companies need some amount of oversight, but this seems to be entirely the wrong solution. Enforcing real identities online has a cost. Facebook has already shown they're barely capable of doing it. Name changes are a known nightmare that result in no action, bans, or temporary suspensions from the service. Other cases also prompt for a government issued ID, such as creating a new account and being flagged by the automated system (this happened a non insignificant amount when the Quest was released). Between technological inability and societal issues, this decision will only make life worse. I sincerely hope they reverse course.

108 points by LordAtlas 5y ago

I think I like this rule in a sense that it will stop intolerant people from creating mess. This is also one reason I left Reddit. However, this also means people wont be vocal and you can't say anything against fascist government. https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dictatorship-of-the-small-minority-3f1f83ce4e15 https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...

MrBuddyCasino 5y ago
Wondering which is more important - not being called a douchebag online or the gradual death of free speech. Impossible to say.
decremental 5y ago
I can't stand places filled with people preoccupied with things like tolerance and inclusion. Not because I think those things are bad, but because those people always turn out to be insufferable and often insane. Worrying about fascism in this context is extremely ironic given how things are playing out in the west in the name of tolerance and inclusion. The future is not looking very bright. By the way, I realize that just by expressing this opinion I am now a nazi.
- jlcoff 5y ago
- aww_dang 5y ago
  There's nothing more alienating than the allegedly "inclusive" environments. These are the places where I'm accused of racism (against myself?) or being a Russian. It isn't xenophobic when they do it. In the next breath they'll celebrate the noblesse oblige of their guilt. These are the places where individual agency is dismissed. My own experience of pulling myself up by my bootstraps is debunked as a fiction. Is there anything more alienating than being told you do not exist? Yes, I cannot wait to use my real name in these places. What a great opportunity for further harassment from these "inclusive" and "tolerant" people who cannot tolerate dissent or experiences which run counter to their "compassionate" ideologies. Up is down. Liberal is restrictive. Inclusive is alienating. https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/the-lonely-work-of-moderating-hacker-news#:~:text=He%20and%20Gackle%20have%20discussed%20diversifying%20their%20team%2C%20and%20adding%20a%20third%20moderator%20who%20is%20non%2Dwhite%2C%20non%2Dmale%2C%20and%2C%20Bell%20joked%2C%20%E2%80%9Cnon%2Dbalding.%E2%80%9D%20Gackle%20clarified%3A%20%E2%80%9CWe%27ve%20talked%20to%20each%20other%20about%20that.%20But%20we%20wouldn%27t%20make%20it%20a%20requirement.%E2%80%9D https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/th...
dpratt 5y ago
Just because you judge other people's opinions as 'intolerant' does not excuse support for forcibly revealing anonymity. At the very least, consider the possibility that opinions that you express that are considered widely popular and 'acceptable' today are likely to be viewed as 'hateful' or 'harmful' in the future. Any weapon you wish to use can easily be turned against you, and if we've learned anything from history, it's nearly certain that it will be.
- cute_boi 5y ago
  Maybe there is a way to enforce integrity without revealing anonymity like phone number, credit card number without revealing personal identity or some trusted third party who can verify the identity during registration? I just want to say nobody should be able to get away by posting atrocious things, scams etc.
tehbeard 5y ago
Doxing 2.0, now government approved!
- spansoa 5y ago
  Doxing needs to be /difficult/ though. It can't be super easy to unmask identities online. Law enforcement with probable cause need to subpoena services like Facebook, Reddit, etc to get dirt on people. Otherwise social media will be a sanitized, boring hellscape.
simion314 5y ago
>I think I like this rule in a sense that it will stop intolerant people from creating mess. T There could be better solutions then sending your ID to Facebook. Like limit posting or sharing for accounts that you suspect are bots, apply the terms of service if the post is against that, put limits on new accounts so their posts don't spread.
- cute_boi 5y ago
  Why do you think facebook etc. doesn't try to limit posting etc? They already enforce such step. But when somebody pays these trolls to create new account and spread intolerance what can you do? These are not bots but a real people hired using pennies to spread misinformation.
  - simion314 5y ago
    How does a troll "spread" stuff ? FB does the spreading with the algorithm right? Am I missing something? What I see on FB is people I know share/like dubious shit like "Japan made microwaves oven illegal" , the original "troll" did not put this one my home page, people did not directly sent me that shit, FB decided "let me show this guy that the other guy seen and like this shit article on some other guy page", FB done all the spreading and even if FB had my and all my friends IDs it would not have stopped this stupid shit appeared on my wall (everyone has their real names and birth place, education, family relations setup in FB)

BitwiseFool 5y ago

I value anonymity for several reasons, not the least of which is the fact that what is acceptable today might possibly become intolerable in the future.

bil7 5y ago
presented with this position, many tech users would claim this doesn't apply to them
- pixl97 5y ago
  It turns out that many tech users are idiots. It also turns out they get very mad when you tell them that and will go on a 10 minute autoriatrian rant on why you are wrong.
  - bil7 5y ago
    most people get mad if you call them an idiot. You can teach them truths about tech without insulting them
    - pixl97 5y ago
      You can't teach a right person nuthin'. It's only when a person is suspect in their conviction they are open to accept new information.

swader999 5y ago

Social credit well on it's way world wide.

spansoa 5y ago
`Let us scan your retina before you upload this meme`
MrYellowP 5y ago
- dang 5y ago
  Could you please stop posting unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments to Hacker News? You've been doing a ton of both lately and we ban that sort of account, regardless of whatever your views on the topics are, because it destroys what HN is supposed to be for. We want curious conversation here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

hyper_reality 5y ago

I still remember the days when almost everyone on Internet forums used pseudonyms and closely guarded their identities. It was even taught in schools not to reveal who you are online. Google, FB and other tech giants changed the norms around this completely for most Internet users. Once these platforms realised it was easier to monetise their users, and control abuse when dealing with real identities, they pushed hard for verified accounts (e.g. Google Plus) even though this is antithetical to the founding ideas of cyberspace. Today we have two Internets, one where anonymity is still possible but you can reveal your true name if you want (e.g. HN), and another of walled gardens with verified identities. The UK government is proposing to enshrine the fully identified concept of the Internet into law. While this will prevent some abuse it's a sad reflection on how some of the early values of cyberspace have been lost, where people could be who they wanted to be, and freely discuss topics they might not wish to have associated with their real names forever. Politicians whose main interaction with the Internet is through their Twitter accounts just don't get that.

ehutch79 5y ago
It's a matter of scale i think. In small communities, you're not really anonymous in the same way as on facebook. You might only be known as DataDog213 on some forum with a hundred members, but the people there know you and who you are as a person. In facebook groups with thousands of members with no real bar or entry, you're really anonymous and no more distinctive than anyone else if you don't make yourself stand out. (By bar of entry, I mean things like even finding the site in the first place)
- smorgusofborg 5y ago
  I'm not really seeing that difference in requirements. Most of the forums were trivial to find in all sorts of Google searches, allowing thousands of people to create a new unique account, and then get banned for violating the pinned rules about asking a question by one of the <100 users that could be recognized as being a repeated chat mate on the one forum. Many of those obsessives on one forum would never be findable somewhere else where they might not have been an expert. I find it a bit sad that thousands of people are on FB using their real names and turning person who says stupid things about several different hobbies into a permanent part of their own fairly permanent identity and I don't actually see how it helps anything. But maybe people who don't find it creepy see something I don't.

Bancakes 5y ago

It's always the UK. When will they get a clue and make their own nannyware? China does it. Russia does it.

CommanderData 5y ago
We don't want it but we'll continue to elect those who push these laws. The British vote against their interests and we laugh about it satiricaly on late night shows.

spansoa 5y ago

I got scared reading this headline, and then realized this is the UK only. I really hope other countries don't copy the UK's draconian and Orwellian technology practices. Anonymity is a cyberspace birthright. I really don't want my dearest thoughts attached to my legal name forever. With enough digging you could probably unearth my real name, but policy like this just makes it trivial to do. The cyberspace ideal is to make it hard for people to know the person behind a piece of text online. The friction of unearthing a real identity needs to be enshrined in Internet Law. Make law enforcement do the extra work of unmasking identities. We can't make it easy for them.

Mindwipe 5y ago
The (insane) UK trade industry body for Age Verification providers believes every site on the internet should be forced to only carry content suitable for under 13s, or should block all access from VPNs in case anyone from the UK is using them. They also came out with the absolutely golden statement this week that it's not too bad that this would put vulnerable people in authoritarian countries at risk, because all we had to do was collapse the governments of Russia, China, much of Africa, Poland, Iran, sizable chunks of the Middle East etc etc. Problem solved!
- mjevans 5y ago
  Why can't sites suitable FOR children opt in to saying they are, and then really prosecuting any website that makes this claim but is false? Then use already built in platform controls to restrict accounts to these 'safe' sites. Just assume everything is unsafe by default, and also free and unrated by default.
dazc 5y ago
Your amazon account is likely already attached to your identity and I'm sure your google account and ip data could very easilly be used to pin point who you are. I'm not really disagreeing with you, in principal, just pointing out that this ship has already sailed for must of us.
- 5y ago

micromacrofoot 5y ago

This is probably a very unpopular opinion, but the lack of anonymity could dramatically improve people's behaviour on Facebook. If we can't touch the algorithm, which we know at various points has been adjusted to promote anger and manipulate emotions, what else can be done? If the lack of anonymity on Facebook means people start deleting their Facebook accounts... this is also a good thing.

quadrifoliate 5y ago
It's a very unpopular opinion because the precedent set (compulsory ID verification for online stuff) is very much not worth the thing that you think you're getting (improved behavior in an online social network). Assume that tomorrow you started requiring compulsory ID verification for, say, entering public parks. It's possible that this would lead to some improvement in the general conditions of public parks. But you would still think of it as dystopian bullshit. This is the same.
- micromacrofoot 5y ago
  Yeah but assume that public park with ID verification was previously filled with sewage. A sewage filled park is also quite dystopian. (if it's unclear, Facebook is the sewage filled park)
anfogoat 5y ago
> This is probably a very unpopular opinion, but the lack of anonymity could dramatically improve people's behaviour on Facebook. I don't think many people would disagree with that. What I disagree with is valuing privacy and internet freedoms so little that you'd be willing to sacrifice on those even the tiniest bit just so people behaved better on social media. And really, disagree is an overly tame word for it, and I couldn't overstate just how much so.
- micromacrofoot 5y ago
  Right, but do you have privacy on Facebook anyway? Already seems like a lost cause in that realm.

CSMastermind 5y ago

I'll run counter to the crowd here. I think that real identity verification could be a very good thing for the internet if implemented correctly. It would raise the barrier to entry for misinformation campaigns conducted online and it would presumably make it harder to spam. I also think that there's a way you could have verification while still maintaining relatively anonymity on these sites (i.e.; I have to verify my identity with Google but I can post under a pseudonym with only Google being able to make the connection back to who I am as a person). Obviously there would still be situations where you'd want true anonymity but plenty of online forums like Reddit's askScience do their own verification of user credentials. It would be nice if there was a verification process in place with someone like Google where I could sign up for a forum I trust less like Reddit and verify I have a degree without revealing (to random Reddit mods) who I am. And this already plays out on age restricted sites on the internet. I buy tobacco products online sometimes and I have to verify with my real driver's license who I am. I'd actually prefer some government service that could do that verification on my behalf so I don't have to give my PII to every store I want to make a purchase from.

pixl97 5y ago
All fun and games till the sites leak who is behind your pseudonym. And you 100% know that your real ID linked information will be sold to advertisers... I mean 'business partners'. People will still steal ID's and link them to accounts. And requiring a telephone number for verification is even worse. I signed up for twitter, they asked for a #. I didn't and my account got locked. Two weeks later they had a data breach and leaked those number to the world. Many services have my information. I don't post my opinions to a single one of those. Please stop fulfilling the authoritarians wet dreams.
bostik 5y ago
> real identity verification could be a very good thing for the internet if implemented correctly. Considering all the edge cases and ill-informed/malicious second-order effects, I don't think it can be implemented correctly. You can never know when a particular group becomes an ostracised target of hate, with every public posting in their history used to smear and attack them, or used as justification to doxx them and have their entire families subjected to a torrent of torment. > I'd actually prefer some government service that could do that verification on my behalf so I don't have to give my PII to every store I want to make a purchase from. So something like BankID? Swedes and Danes on HN can probably air their gripes about that system.

wordsarelies 5y ago

So... Weibo, but the UK version.

graphpercolator 5y ago

"The government has also proposed measures that would force companies to filter out "legal but harmful" material" This isn't government censorship though. It is just a private company that can choose to comply with the law or not. Something something not censorship. Something something children!!

MrYellowP 5y ago
stjohnswarts 5y ago
Looks like you got down voted for that. lol. HN never disappoints. Have my upvote. You are 100% correct. The UK and Australia (and to an extent the USA) have been looking enviously at the social credit rating that China has put in place and want to start installing the foundation of such a system in our countries, and we should fight it whenever we can and call it out for what it is.

_Algernon_ 5y ago

Fuck that.

MrYellowP 5y ago

mattlondon 5y ago

It is kinda sad that this sort of stuff keeps coming up again and again. Yet it is Twitter and Facebook again and again that are the breeding grounds for the abuse it seems. I guess the argument from Twitter et al is "oh if we ban a racist troll they just re-register a new account. Sorry nothing we can do!". Well thanks Twitter for trying to ignore the problem, now we end up with legislation like this proposal which will be a fuck-ton more hassle and more importantly chilling-effect than something simpler that probably could have been done earlier but no one could be fagged to do, like e.g. defaulting to allowlist-only messages, sentiment analysis leading to human moderation, IP-based blocks/cooldowns, rate-limiting, client fingerprinting, nipple/genital-detecting ML, reputation-before-posting type systems etc. Nah mate - nothing we can do! These damn trolls just totally outwit us here at <XX-billion dollar company> with hundreds/thousands of super-smart engineers every time they register a new account! It is unsolvable!

BiteCode_dev 5y ago
Besides, while twitter pretend not requiring a phone number to register, they effectively do. So they can do something, because trolls and bots are not that subtle, and can be detected, and ban is effective, because creating an account with a phone number is cheap, but not free.
InCityDreams 5y ago
"but no one could be fagged to do", could be really misinterpreted across the Atlantic, and possibly be a black mark against you in 'the future'..thank goodness for anonymity(!)
HWR_14 5y ago
> Well thanks Twitter for trying to ignore the problem, now we end up with legislation like this proposal which will be a fuck-ton more hassle And give Twitter valuable real world identities for their users. Forced on them by the government.

ukraineally 5y ago

This will be a fix coming to virtually every major country very soon. "Disinformation" and "Misinformation" and "hate" stuff is going to hit every country and it's not surprising how quick everyone has moved on this. Let me describe what just went down in Canada. A national catastrophe. If you disagree with my take, I'm happy to provide sources. We have a vaccine mandate disproportionately harming racial minorities, it's still in place. Why do Black Canadians not get vaccinated? Tuskegee? I don't know. Why do the indigenous? Maybe because the Canadian government has a history of experimenting on them? Ultimately doesn't matter as part of the discussion. We look to our 2 greatest allies, USA and UK. They had no mandates or at least had a roadmap to the end. We didn't have a roadmap and we just unemployed those people? There's legitimate cause for protest. This article can be my proof that the protest in Ottawa was diverse: https://thepostmillennial.com/jagmeet-singh-faces-backlash-after-accusing-truckers-of-white-supremacy https://thepostmillennial.com/jagmeet-singh-faces-backlash-a... The problem was that the Canadian media labelled the convoy as a bunch of nazis. there was literally only 1 nazi flag and there also just happened to have professional photographers following him? Was he even party of the convoy/protest? That was enough though, the hate convoy was fabricated. There's virtually no nazis and certainly no confederates in Canada. That's not our thing. Hell, the total protest size is estimated well above 100,000 people. Even if Canada has nazis, we don't have that many. Not once did Trudeau go talk to the protest. He refused because they were all a bunch of nazis with unacceptable views. The ottawa police couldn't do anything against their right to protest and it was big enough that Trudeau couldn't keep ignoring. People demanded action against these nazis before they overthrow the government. Trudeau deployed martial law and arrested the lawful protest. Those illegal nazis looking to overthrow the government! Trudeau in parliament even got to calling a Jewish MP a nazi for standing with swastikas. He even refused to apologize and doubled down later(a jewish liberal MP called her a nazi as well) Crushing dissent in Canada got denunciation by tons of good left-wing celebrities. Worse yet, the judge who is presiding over the court cases of these protesters is a liberal party candidate back in 2011. Clear conflict of interest. Right before the Ukraine invasion, Trudeau absolutely abruptly stopped all the name calling over night. He then spoke that there's a great need to start talking to your friends and family who have differing political views. Typical anti echo chamber stuff. This is the day he got briefed about Putin's invasion I am sure. He went from declaring martial law to revoking it in an instant. Baffling everyone. There's literally a Liberal senator who asserted "Honk Honk" actually stands for Heil Hitler. Absolute crazy person. Meanwhile Jordan peterson was having a heart attack online because he justly saw the tyranny of the government for what it was. The government did crush dissent. We do have political prisoners. This is a current catastrophe that hasn't been fixed at all. Attention went to Ukraine for good reason, but we have a nightmare still in Canada. This abrupt 180 on the national emergency, Trudeau baffled everyone. People said 'oh the polls are in', Nope. Polls are in, they havent budged. senate was going to vote against(they werent). the various global celebrities calling Trudeau out on his actions. Nope. Our PM just quietly admitted to it during the Ukraine sanctions speech, in his speech he said, and I paraphrase and taken out of context and ruined in every way, "for the past few weeks putin has been controlling the media" Putin has controlled the media for decades in Russia. This was an admission of Canadian media. The past few weeks have been the convoy. In fact, international media were fantastic. NYTimes put their political ideology aside and called Trudeau out. Round of applause for the NYtimes. In fact, the international media were generally pretty fair, many didnt agree with the point of the protest, but agreed the protest should continue. They went to the protest because the Canadian media labelled this protest as 100,000 strong nazis looking to overthrow the government. International media saw a fantastic story because Canadians are generally good people, but when they got boots on the ground... that's obviously not what they found. Putin made it clear: He was invading to denazify Ukraine. Ironically the amazing president of ukraine is jewish. But we heard this just recently didn't we... Who else just called a Jewish person a Nazi? No, Trudeau simply got disinformed to an extreme degree by Russian propaganda. His echo chamber told him everyone was a nazi. All this BS about nazis, systemic racism and all that crap is Putin. The journalists who have been pushing all this nazi crap are russian agents. In fact, this entire protest was covered by rt.com about 100x more than the CBC covered it. Fox news was like 50x more than the CBC. Other entities covered it about the same. I would bet good money that the RCMP and CSIS are investigating those journalists today. The world is about to pass laws to ban disinformation because it was clearly weaponized by Russia. However, we have an ongoing injustice here in Canada. I expect monday when parliament resumes Trudeau will offer that apology to Melissa Lantsman. I hope he elaborates on this more.

Kim_Bruning 5y ago

I guess it needs to be repeated often, but it is the weakest members of society who need anonymity the most. Banning anonymity won't stop online bullying or other misbehavior by itself. Meanwhile it outs people to the bullies and saves the bullies a lot of time wrt needing to dox their targets first. Granted, possibly forcing real names will make it easier to catch some bullies; but you won't catch all of them. Conversely you'll have removed an important safe harbor for their victims.

nileshtrivedi 5y ago
The followup question is: how do we prevent the powerful members of the society from abusing the anonymity (fake news, fake support, corruption, other kinds of sybil attacks) that is intended for the weakest ones?
- vorpalhex 5y ago
  We teach people how to use the "block" button and think critically. That is the only solution that is compatible with human rights.
- fuzzer37 5y ago
  Teach critical thinking? Not everything needs to be spoonfed to everyone all the time.
- Kim_Bruning 5y ago
  You're not wrong. Everyone benefits from anonymity, including the bad guys. The problem is that the strong side still has many ways to bully people even without anonymity. On the other hand the weak side ends up with Nowhere To Hide. Something to take into account is that culture changes and people change, and some things are situational. Even if you're on the majority side here and now; doesn't mean you might not be on the 'undesirable' side sometime/someplace else.
Barrin92 5y ago
Not true at all. The weakest members of society benefit from acting collectively, anonymity is a great thing if you're trying to hide your fortune. Peter Thiel has more to gain from anonymity than a MeToo member. There's a reason why your address and taxes paid are public information in Sweden. Moving things into the public sphere, transparency, and protection by the law is what helps weak people. Anonymity is a tool of power, always has been.

ClumsyPilot 5y ago

Facebook, Twitter and the rest of this basket of deplorables will meet their reconing in every nation. The problem is not that they've created a spyware empire that has swindled the common man - the problem is that they've swindled politicians and whole countries. In their greed, they cultivated bot armies that deploy propaganda for corporations and political parties on their platforms. They've swinged laws and elections. And they raked in the profits. If they had kept it just to business and domestic politics, maybe they could get away with this. But in their arrogance they crossed the line - when Taliban got a twitter account that regulatrly gets into spats with the CIA one, and when Russian state got millions of bots pushing propaganda (and many others) You have to be breathtakingly arrogant or insanely stupid to think that Putin and the CIA will be playthings of your newsfeed. The 'free-market of the brain' finally pissed off the only force in the West that's valued above Capitalism, and that's Nationalism / National security. Their business will survive, but they will get cut down to size and never be the players they once were. It won't happen overnight, but I would not hodl their stock.

LightG 5y ago

This will usher in the end of Big Tech. At least for me personally. VPN at the ready. The UK government is the pinnacle of "If you haven't got anything to hide, you have nothing to worry about". Potential police state. The only reason it's not a total nightmare here is I'm sure the police are so underfunded that they couldn't take advantage of all this bullsh!t, even if they wanted to. This is effective "police state virtue signalling" to its hardcore supporters. Red meat to the dogs. It won't actually mean anything in practice. Obligatory: But that doesn't mean you give up your identity, for fear of a more resourced and/or different police/state apparatus in future.

johncearls 5y ago
> The only reason it's not a total nightmare here is I'm sure the police are so underfunded that they couldn't take advantage of all this bullsh!t, even if they wanted to. This actually makes it worse because this means it will selectively be used against "enemies" of the establishment. That and for select and well-publicized chilling effects.

ramesh31 5y ago

I think we will look back on this early era of technology with great nostalgia, as sort of a modern wild west. Where people 50 years from now will think "My god, could you really just get online and do whatever the hell you wanted with no consequences? How insane is that?", in the same way that we now think "My god, could you really just go out west and stake a claim of free land in Kansas for yourself? How insane is that?". As the boundary between the digital and physical world increasingly ceases to exist, I fully expect that we will eventually be required to provide full identification at the ISP level to access the web.

zmmmmm 5y ago

I see a lot of people discussing this as a negative for big tech, but to me it seems like the biggest gift governments could give them. Right now they either don't demand real identity or they have to justify in ways that try to hide their real intent - your real identity makes you a much cleaner and more valuable data point for monetisation and other user-hostile aims. If this passes they can just point the finger at government and blame them. Instead of people being outraged at Facebook for demanding a picture of their driver's license, Facebook will just be saying "Legal requirements in your country demand that we do this" and all the outrage will be directed at government. Unless politicians are smart enough to also propose a technical framework that prevents it happening, this seems like a boon for big tech.

vorpalhex 5y ago

> ..Minister Nadine Dorries in a statement. “People will now have more control over who can contact them and be able to stop the tidal wave of hate served up to them by rogue algorithms.” Did you catch it? The issue is the algorithm, not the anonymity. This is just an excuse to stretch the authoritarian muscle.

stjohnswarts 5y ago
Exactly get a taste of power and want more and more in a positive feedback loop. They see us all as children or sheep under their control, and they know better than us in all matters.

mindslight 5y ago

Why bother working on seizing Russian owned assets as reparations for an illegal war, when it's more convenient to use the moment to push totalitarianism onto your own population instead? After the initial rush of solidarity, crises always bring out the opportunistic scumbags.

ryan29 5y ago

I think trolling, misinformation, etc. are big problems, but forcing everyone to use their real identities online is a mistake. I see several problems with it. First, you take away people's ability to learn how to be a good participant by using a low value identity. I did this a lot when I was younger and I think it's extremely important for kids and young adults to have the option of throwing away their identity to start over. Think of it like bankruptcy for your reputation. I used a pseudonym when I first started participating on open source bug trackers and mailing lists. I think it turns out that I was doing a good job of participating even though I was a bit unsure of myself, but I still think it was a good idea to leave myself the option of abandoning that identity. When I started using my real name I was concerned about tarnishing my permanent reputation, so I was always careful with things I said. I think that's helped me become a much better participant. I never talk politics, I wait a day to post if I'm frustrated, I say please and thank you, and I don't contradict project members unless I can back it up with a provable test case (or qualify it with "in my opinion", etc. if it's subjective). Second, you're not going to eliminate misinformation if it's propaganda from a nation-state. At that point there's nothing stopping them from creating new identities as needed and those identities will be more valuable because everyone will be operating under the false assumption they're dealing with a natural person with a verified identity. You could force everyone to use their real legal name in an attempt to help people distinguish nationalities, but the appropriateness of that approach is a debate on its own and there's nothing that says a person from the US or UK can't have a Russian or Chinese name. What's next? Are we going to make people participate with their full legal name and address? Third, you'll create an opportunity for someone else to capture the social media markets by building a better system that doesn't require identity verification. People will take the path of least resistance. That's why YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc. got popular. They were easy to use. I'm from Canada. Why would I subject myself to identity verification to use a (foreign) US platform if there's a competing (foreign) Chinese platform that doesn't ask for my photo ID and a face scan? Opening the door for China or Russia to build competing systems is a bad idea if you're from a western country and a welcome opportunity if you're not. I think there's value in oversight and regulation and, since I'm from Canada, I always favor services that have Canadian regulators (FINTRAC, CRTC, CIRA etc.). However, that's only for things involving money and that I consider valuable (financial accounts, phone numbers, domains). I'm not sure if I'd choose a Canadian regulated social media platform that requires my government ID over a foreign competitor that doesn't if I don't attribute any value to the account / profile.

Havoc 5y ago

>People will now have more control over who can contact them and be able to stop the tidal wave of hate served up to them by rogue algorithms. No, it'll strip UK people of the safety of online anonymity and do nothing about said hate, trolls and fake accounts still flooding in from the other 194 countries/corners of the internet. UK has been on a rather ominous surveillance state trip lately.

stjohnswarts 5y ago

lol 10% of their global revenue? I don't think I've ever heard a bill that is more dead on arrival. Google will never operate in a country with those kinds of penalties and MPs know that.

stjohnswarts 5y ago

From the country that brought you 1984 and the Magna Carta: 100% Surveillance Society. Shame on you UK. "Think of the children!" I am; I am thinking of them living in a free society.

hiimshort 5y ago

Distressing to say the least. I'm sure plenty of people would agree that these companies need some amount of oversight, but this seems to be entirely the wrong solution. Enforcing real identities online has a cost. Facebook has already shown they're barely capable of doing it. Name changes are a known nightmare that result in no action, bans, or temporary suspensions from the service. Other cases also prompt for a government issued ID, such as creating a new account and being flagged by the automated system (this happened a non insignificant amount when the Quest was released). Between technological inability and societal issues, this decision will only make life worse. I sincerely hope they reverse course.