[marmarama]

The problem is those self-same authoritarian strongmen are very successfully using sockpuppeting to change national discourses in ways that benefit them and are detrimental to the targeted countries. Hybrid war is real and has been ongoing for more than a decade. LLMs make it way more cost effective.

Being able to limit the influence of external bad actors is the main goal of ID verification. Age verification is a useful side effect that makes it easier to sell to the general public.

Big Tech has had at least a decade to fix this, did nothing of note, and is all out of ideas. Privacy advocates had the same time to figure out a "least bad" technical solution, but got so obsessed with railing against it happening at all, that nothing got any traction.

So governments are here to legislate, for better or worse. They know it's a trade-off between being undermined by external forces vs. the systems being abused by future governments, but their take is that a future authoritarian government will end up implementing something similar anyway.

[malfist]

> Being able to limit the influence of external bad actors is the main goal of ID verification. Age verification is a useful side effect that makes it easier to sell to the general public.

How? People already sell their accounts to spammers. Why would that change?

[inkysigma]

Depending on the implementation, I could see that having rate limiting effects. There're only finitely many IDs so scaling sockpuppeting will saturate these IDs quickly but it's quite easy to spin up a new anonymous account. For example, I think the EU ID system has an upcoming way to create pseudo anonymous identifiers that can identify a user per website.

This presents the problem of governments being able to gatekeep speech which I am quite uncomfortable with but maybe there's some safeguard within the eIDAS proposal that makes this idea incorrect?

[hellojesus]

The internet is for the free exchange of ideas! Why would we want to limit it because some random gov somewhere is writing comments? Allow your citizens to think!

[ajam1507]

> Being able to limit the influence of external bad actors is the main goal of ID verification.

How does automatically determining your age serve the goal of ID verification? It seems like most sites are choosing this as the first option. If the point was to link your ID, why wouldn't they ask everyone to provide it?

[specialist]

Correct.

The choice is between democracy and our current ever worsening sociopolitical hellscape.

If eliminating bots and sockpuppets is the price for restoring some semblance of democracy, then gosh darn.

And if social media, targeted ads, and algorithmic hate machines are collateral damage, than gee double gosh darn.

Those sacrifices are a price I'm willing to pay.

[anextio]

> "Democracy" is when "bad actors" (as defined by the establishment) are shut out of all online discourse.

The point of ID laws is not to stop "bots" or "sockpuppets", it's to enable governments to shut down the speech of their political adversaries by painting them as dangerous. That is not democracy, that is authoritarianism, even if you absolutely hate the people that are being shut up.

Western countries are not in the midst of polarized political crises because of "external bad actors" or "sockpuppets". They're in these crises because of fundamental contradictions in values and desired policies between different segments of the populace.

The Europeans are currently full steam ahead in attempting to "fix" the situation by criminalizing dissent, which will, in the end, only exacerbate the political crisis by making the democratic system illegitimate.

[specialist]

> The point of ID laws is not to stop "bots"...

Then make it the point.

The Internet is already all but dead. We could fix it (as I propose). Or we let it die.

I'm fine with either outcome.

> criminalizing dissent

When has that not been true? Serious question.

Socrates was compelled to commit suicide. Jesus was nailed to a cross. Journalist and activists are routinely murdered. How many political prisoners are there right now?

The outcome you fear happened a long time ago.

[hellojesus]

Yet we discourse here just fine. The internet isn't dead. It's just boring if you go to the boring parts.

[specialist]

> The internet isn't dead.

I was referring to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory#Claims

> Yet we discourse here just fine.

True. But what makes HN an outlier?

[hellojesus]

Probably the lack of pictures. Maybe the moderation. Maybe the slight niche.

It could die if it becomes profitable to spamers. Or maybe it's dead now and one or both of us are llms.

But as long as the content quality meets my personal utility threshold, it makes sense for me to visit it, regardless of whether it is a victim of DIT. Ultimately it's probably up to webmasters to understand if the traffic on their site is either profitable or of a high enough quality to justify the operating costs of a hobby.

[areoform]

Do you truly believe that ID "verification" will do anything in a world where IDs are leaked by the tens of thousands to the millions?

You are shifting the onus on to the platforms, when the problem is pretty simple; with a few exceptions, we've failed as a species to learn how to think.

Also do you think that the TLAs don't know who the bots most likely are with all the surveillance data they're gathering? That the NSA doesn't have detailed telemetry of the surveillance ops??

Let me ask you the question, what have they done about it? And why not?

[jonathanstrange]

> Being able to limit the influence of external bad actors is the main goal of ID verification.

Then they should say so. Elected officials lying to and misleading the public when their real intentions differ is almost criminal. It's not a behavior anyone should ever support. I will not vote for people who do that.

[drawfloat]

The stated reason is also true in most cases. Imgur was caught harvesting and selling childrens’ data for advertising purposes, TikTok and others are also known to do this. There’s only so long you can avoid fixing a problem before states start to step in.

[jonathanstrange]

I don't think "we technically don't lie, we're only actively deceiving you" is a good defense strategy. The politicians you defend need to decide on a narrative for the justification, meandering between different ones is not increasing credibility and a problem on its own.