[kivle]

I think it has more to do with digital verification for social media in a hope of killing bot accounts that are interfering in the public debate. Some of the biggest social media influencer accounts turns out to be Chinese/Russian bots trying to fuel hate/division our democracies, and with LLMs it is only getting worse. Some form of digital ID to verify social media account identities is probably the only hope left of having a real public debate.

[js8]

The bot problem is solvable by using a web of trust system. You don't need a digital ID for that (i.e. you don't need to tie your digital world identity to a real world identity, nor you need a central agency to manage these).

In web of trust, anyone could publicly certify who they know is a real person (i.e. validate a link from their id to another id). Then, if you received a message from someone, the system would find the path in the graph of real people you trust, to determine the trustworthiness of the source. So if the account is a bot, there would be no path from it to you in the trust graph.

The advantage is that everyone could supply their own subjective trustworthiness score, altering the graph. They could even publish it, so that other people could use trustworthiness assesment of accounts they personally trust.

The big issue with a system of web of trust is that it is too efficient, and just kills commercial advertising (and also propaganda). Because that is all about overcoming the natural web of trust that humans have.

[petre]

That's actually great for social media companies to create a profile on you and feed you ads. They don't care about the bots or denocracy. The only hope for a real public debate is to show up in person at the debate.

[vaylian]

Then the politicians should be honest about this goal. The best way to solve a problem requires understanding what the problem is. If we pretend to solve another problem, the solution for the actual will be less than ideal.

[sunaookami]

>Some of the biggest social media influencer accounts turns out to be Chinese/Russian bots trying to fuel hate/division our democracies

This is propaganda, none of those supposed networks exists or were successful in anything and when the media do show some supposed accounts they don't have a lot of views. Please stop falling for this, your democracy sucks because the politicians suck and the people want change so they turn to extremist parties.

[bootsmann]

Yes, obviously, the Romanian supreme court having to overturn and annul a presidential election due to Russian social media inference is entirely made up propaganda.

[sunaookami]

Romania's courts are corrupt and not independent.

[strictnein]

> "none of those supposed networks exists"

Countries have been interfering in the internal workings of other countries for centuries, if not millennia. If you want to read up on more recent accounts of this, many of which predate social media, the book Active Measures by Thomas Rid is a good place to start.

Or you can continue to think that this is all just made up "propaganda" and we're all fools, but you alone have seen the light.

[chupasaurus]

Russian "bot farms" are investigated quite well. Usually they operate in Russian-speaking sides of platforms but sometimes they go "foreign". I agree that impact of those might be exaggerated but it's hard to measure in the first place.