[domsom]

Adding an option to verify accounts by linking them to social security numbers or corporate registrations and marking them accordingly (without necessarily making the details visible publicly) could at least direct trust to accounts that can be traced to real entities.

[dathinab]

The problem is that the US has no proper/well working ID systems. A large amount of social security numbers had been compromised through leakage and are hardly reliably usable for identification anymore.

Through there are many countries in which this can be indeed done reliably sand effectively.

Through the main problem is still this networks are global, so bots will just register with origins where IDs can be easily faked/stolen etc.

But it might still help a lot for local discussions if you would make it clearly visible if a person had a no or a non local real person identification.

If such a system is done cleverly it could also help law enforcement while it still upholds privacy. Through it's will always be someway prone to abuse by police and similar if not done perfectly transparent but you can be sure that certain lobbies will invest insane amounts of money into making it non transparent over time. Which makes such systems potential dangerous to have.

[ed25519FUUU]

> Adding an option to verify accounts by linking them to social security

Not sure if you’re joking, but this would be a completely awful privacy situation. Why would you ever give your social security number to a social media site?

[ocdtrekkie]

That just provides a massive amount of data that can be compromised in a data breach while making hacking real people's accounts much more worthwhile.

[isoskeles]

This is an awful idea considering data breaches happen. Unless they figure out a way to store the SSN hashed so it cannot be reused, but SSN seems so fundamental that I’m not sure I’d trust any hashing algorithm for it. Especially considering the inputs are so limited.