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This is a bit too late. PSYOP campaigns have plagued Twitter & Facebook from the beginning. Twitter cracked down multiple times on fake accounts, but the operat

by vmoore 4y ago

This is a bit too late. PSYOP campaigns have plagued Twitter & Facebook from the beginning. Twitter cracked down multiple times on fake accounts, but the operators change their modus operandi each time. It's basically whack-a-mole against the troll farm operators. Requiring phone numbers might slow them down, but then they just acquire a bunch of SIMs and continue registering. The only way to stop this is verifying people's passports and their account has to be held in their legal name. Just like a bank. It might be over the top, but it's the only way to drastically reduce the amount of propaganda, spam, astroturfing, disinfo, and artificially inflated metrics of Twitter & Facebook.

kmeisthax 4y ago
Part of the problem is that Twitter and Facebook deliberately traded away effective moderation in the pursuit of scale. They are not just bad at moderation, they explicitly oppose it. Remember how Twitter gave Trump exemption from their own rules from 2017 thru 2021? They called it the World Leaders Policy, as in, "these world leaders provide so much value to our platform that we are going to give them a pass on our rules in the name of free speech". If I remember correctly, this even extended to DMCA 512 takedowns, which is an absolutely stupid level of risk to take on to protect a handful of users. The Mudge disclosure also revealed that several Twitter admins - as in, people with control over all the servers and databases - are actually foreign agents of India or China's current governments. This is absolutely ludicrous levels of risk to take on for any company, but social media is so addicted to scale that this was deemed acceptable. So even if Twitter were to enforce identity verification on everyone, they would still let the trolls through. Because the whole org is compromised and their incentives are to compromise themselves at every step.
- ClumsyPilot 4y ago
  > This is absolutely ludicrous levels of risk to take on You have it all wrong. Pissing off world leaders is taking on serious level of risk.

by vmoore 4y ago

kmeisthax 4y ago

Part of the problem is that Twitter and Facebook deliberately traded away effective moderation in the pursuit of scale. They are not just bad at moderation, they explicitly oppose it. Remember how Twitter gave Trump exemption from their own rules from 2017 thru 2021? They called it the World Leaders Policy, as in, "these world leaders provide so much value to our platform that we are going to give them a pass on our rules in the name of free speech". If I remember correctly, this even extended to DMCA 512 takedowns, which is an absolutely stupid level of risk to take on to protect a handful of users. The Mudge disclosure also revealed that several Twitter admins - as in, people with control over all the servers and databases - are actually foreign agents of India or China's current governments. This is absolutely ludicrous levels of risk to take on for any company, but social media is so addicted to scale that this was deemed acceptable. So even if Twitter were to enforce identity verification on everyone, they would still let the trolls through. Because the whole org is compromised and their incentives are to compromise themselves at every step.

ClumsyPilot 4y ago
> This is absolutely ludicrous levels of risk to take on You have it all wrong. Pissing off world leaders is taking on serious level of risk.