Well this is going to cause some confusion when you and I get our IDs printed… Can’t be helped, though.

If that’s the case for everyone, I fully approve of this. People need to stop using social media.

Exactly. I’m almost there with YouTube if I don’t find solution to this:

@troyunrau I agree. One reason social media is so toxic is the use of “handles” and “pseudonyms” instead of real, verified names. People will say things to you online that they would not say to your face. If you have a privacy issue with using your real identity, then you can choose not to use the platform.

One way around this is to nationalize social media companies. Use public funding to run the service instead of private companies and run the service in the same way as licensing a vehicle to drive on the highway.

Social media has essentially become a public necessity that everyone wants and needs, it should be run and regulated like the public water system. It should be run, controlled, regulated and monitored by a system like the postal service where it isn’t designed to make money but instead concentrate all is activity into just providing a critical independent service to everyone.

Is my fetish fiction something bad that I have to take accountability for? No, it’s harmless. Would I still post it attached to my real name? Never.

I think there’s a place for both. So long as none of it becomes mandatory, and online communities can freely choose to offer anonymous or verified identities, it’s an idea worth trying.

Plenty of verified people provide disinformation and trolling. There’s an entire American cable news channel dedicated to it. Several now, really.

The problem isn’t that people spread disinformation, it’s that people believe it without verifying. We need to increase peoples ability to utilize critical thinking skills, not somehow stem the unending tide of bullshittery.

There will always be snake oil salesman seeking to profit off the gullibility of the general public. The solution isn’t to kill all the salesman, it’s to teach people to be less gullible.

That sounds like a good idea for a lemmy instance.

There’s two points of consideration here, let’s see if I can make my point without a wall of text, I’m prone to those…

1. Anonimity: the fact that where you connect cannot know who exactly you are. This should be straightforward, anonimity should not be taken away, it is a core part of the internet in my opinion. It’s extremely important that we can express ourselves freely without fear of being persecuted. Despite the negative sides that it has, as those with ill intent will be harder to find (but not impossible). In this the common quote attributed to Franklin applies well in my opinion: Those who sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither.

2. Proof of personhood: basically the difficult task of making sure that the other end of an internet connection has a real person, and together with that, proof that it is different than others, the ability to know you are you and not someone else.

This is incredibly interesting as a technical problem to be solved, and I do agree with you that the internet as we know it is at risk if we don’t solve it properly. It is specially hard to solve if you try to guarantee anonimity (like I believe it should be).

The wikipedia has an article about it that I think gives a good idea about the topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_of_personhood

Personally I have been quite carefully interested into the whole World ID solution, using a device called orb with open specifications that captures some data from your iris that should be unique per person, storing only an encrypted piece of information in a blockchain and on your device locally so that you can use it to identify yourself as a real unique person and only once, but wherever you use it, cannot know anything about you except that. There’s a lot of possible criticism to such a system, but insofar as I have checked and can understand, it seems like a legit solution. But I leave here the link for anyone interested enough to check it themselves: https://world.org/world-id

Even with verification the Internet will be full of misinformation.

Let’s look at the recent 2024 Springfield pet-eating hoax. A woman, who I can lookup the name of, posted that she heard people in her neighborhood were eating cats and dogs. That misinformation quickly spread and was shouted at a US Presidential debate.

While the woman who originally posted it apologized, no one who spread that misinformation did.

While verification might help keep some people honest, it’s likely only going to keep those already honest, honest.

There’s 2 different things here:

• Anonymity
• Truth (of people and / or info)

You need both or you’re loosing freedom of speech.

If the government is “nice“, then you won’t feel threatened by this and you’ll believe that it’s better because we can now find the “bad guys”.

But what if the rules change and your thoughts / feelings / beliefs are now “bad”… how do you band together to make it better?

And, the internet is already flooded by bots, well, at least 50%, but I’m guessing no-one’s noticed.

Why look to a (oversized) stick to deal with behavior by some people that may be brought on by lack of responsibility? Consider carrots: rewards for good behavior.

The internet is probably not worth losing privacy, which protects your freedom, anyway.

So you offer abolishing privacy to abolishing privacy? No, it will be like in fascist Russia or fascist China. P.S. It sounds like some utopia like communism, socialism, anarchism and similar BS lol

I’m only partly ok with it if it comes with anonymization of my identity. It should be possible to authenticate yourself without anybody knowing who you are or knowing that you authenticated. Maybe we could use an ID card scanner that generates some sort of code that can be used for anonymous identity validation.

We should also be a lot harder on social media companies that abuse our data. These companies should not be allowed to exist.