Greece to ban anonymity on social media

Mitsotakis (The Prime Minister) and his Political Party (New Democracy - the name is probably the irony of the story -) were spying their political opponents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Greek_surveillance_scanda... using Predator Spying software.

No surprise here

How close are we to a third party with sufficient compute being able to mass-de-anonymize social media? What happens if they republish social media feeds with identity probabilities? Do we reach a point where the internet is anonymous to casual users but not to large corporations or governments? Presumably someone is already selling identity-labelling as a service?

Amusingly, (locally generated) LLM text becomes an anonymity mask in those scenarios.

I've often wanted real name policies for writing and anonymity for reading. And I don't think bans are the way to go, I think one should just shift the norms on this so that it becomes easy to verify an identity and therefore easy to see which ones are anonymous. The problem right now is that real identity and anonymous blend together, so anonymous can pretend to be real, which might seem even more so in the age of AI.

I wonder if there are different levels to this: 1) real identity/name 2) humanness 3) completely anonymous.

(definitely open to other suggested levels)

For example, if someone is posting on the internet with a real name, I want them to actually be that person. If they're posting with a username, I mostly just want them to be a human. I don't know how much I'd be open to it being hard to know whether it was a human or bot.

With regards to reading stats, public or private, I'd still like to know whether human vs bot. I think YouTube and Twitter/X and IG and all these platforms have been gamed by lots of bots pretending to be unique humans and those stats get wildly out of touch with how many humans actually interact (which I think matters for true popularity and advertising and basic understanding of social interactions).

I think the challenge is if it's real identity, often it doesn't split between real identity and simple proof of humanity. Maybe it's not that easy from a tech standpoint, and maybe it's because companies would want to track every move and people want privacy, but maybe it'd be easier if more people wanted it.

So I wonder how to balance this.

I'm curious to hear your thoughts.

"Greece does not understand Democracy." - Publius.

I'd say that they should imitate not Lycurgus, but rather Pericles.

Ancient Greece did not have agents crawling peoples stuff for profiling. The argument is broken.

How would this impact platforms like Reddit or HN?

This sounds great on paper but only if democracy and checks and balances are in order...

This will be very interesting to observe. Social media is a cesspool and getting worse by the minute. Even hacker news is being inundated with bots. On controversial topics tons of new accounts appear arguing divisively both sides of the argument.

It’s clear that nefarious regimes have won on social media.

It would be interesting to understand the ratio of real human posts to manipulation on twitter for example - I’d imagine it has long ago tipped to majority bot.

Tackling this problem is existential for western democracies. This seems like a reasonable idea. There might be other options (like validated but anonymous) but we have to try something.

It’s worth noting too that many strong western democracies have laws around hate speech and libel that are being broken by anonymous people online - and the citizens of those countries are perfectly happy with those laws.

I wonder how they plan to implement that on decentralized social networks such as Nostr. I assume targeting big centralized networks such as X and Facebook is good enough.

Πάντα πρωτοπόροι στη μλκ.

Culturally, is Greece really sensitive? Honest question.

>We can't determine who is talking about those pesky Epstein files and shut them up!

Yeah, it's toxic behavior, I'm sure of it.

I foresee a lot of people's dead relative's being used to push Russian talking points in the future

Edit: not sure why the downvotes, this will absolutely spur a black market for identities that less than reputable actors will exploit; just like those shady free VPNs that will use your computer as an exit node for their residential proxy network

No need to dress it up as think of the children anymore!

I don't think we ought to ban anonymity, but I think we should make it a requirement for social networks to display country of origin. Unfortunately that's impossible because of VPNs. Perhaps a system where you're identity is verified by a third party, all documents erased, but leaves you with a permanent token that allows you to authenticate as a citizen of some country.

I know that it's not popular here but I appreciate the anonymity of 4chan. With no user ids no one is harvesting karma/reputation and so you get to read some of what to me are truly alien perspectives. I'm normally pretty positive about people (some would call me naive) but 4chan lets me see how there are some true monsters out there and that I could be interacting with them in real life. But yeah, I understand what Greece is trying to do - I just don't think it'll be possible to enforce it.