[anonnel]

Making neighborhood gossip easier is worrying on many levels.

A hack that has been used in the past to scale totalitarian social control is to employ what is essentially a viral enforcement mechanism: basically, getting people to inform on their neighbors. It only takes one or two visible instances of this behavior with a violent outcome and it replicates quickly, following an exponential growth rate until the population is saturated with informants.

Reporting on neighbors and peers is much of the glue which has held together the worst authoritarian regimes: DPRK, East Germany, Nazi Germany ... as well as being a primary strategy for causing the revolutions which put those regimes in place.

A platform like this:

- lowers the friction of informing

- is vulnerable to anonymity / spoofing / automation / remote manipulation

- allows for stories of informing to persist in the community memory as always-online posts, increasing their effect across time

- is connected to a de facto surveillance apparatus (the internet) to boot