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Social media have a very difficult problem to solve: the lack of consequences (due, in part, to anonymity) makes them a cesspool where people can be the absolute worse and rarely face any punishment for it.
They also have a bot problem that’s also hard to solve.
We need to fight these issues and, while identifying the uses definitely helps, the loss of privacy is too big for it to be a good trade-off.
The solution is much simpler: start making these companies responsible of what happens in their grounds as soon as they grow under a certain threshold.
If your social network has more than, say, 1 million users, you are big enough to be held accountable for what happens there.
This way, you force the big ones to start worrying about what happens in their grounds while also leaving small communities (that usually lack the means to moderate 24/7 their places) untouched in the same way they are now.
The problem with that is: https://www.techdirt.com/2019/11/20/masnicks-impossibility-theorem-content-moderation-scale-is-impossible-to-do-well/
My own idea, don’t make it depend on platform size.
Make it depend on the existence of recommendation algorithms: anything recommended by an algorithm counts as speech by the platform.
If that were the law, any forum or wiki no matter who operates it isn’t liable, but Facebook or TikTok would need to quickly turn off all options except “show me chronologically what the accounts I explicitly followed posted” (of course “most liked in the last 12 hours” or similar would also still be ok, but “this too might interest you based on your previous activity” wouldn’t). That would also turn them into actually useful communication systems.
Really smart indeed! If your algorithm recommends something, then you are automatically liable for that content. I like it. It would really change things!
i think there are privacy preserving ways of validating users as real humans but i doubt that will be the mechanism proposed
the mechanism to counter disinformation is equally tricky but we should definitely start trying
ID-verified Lemmy when?
Here is your verified ID: MPX5846-2. Use it responsibly!
If they hate privacy, why can’t we have a look at their email accounts?
Not sure how I’d will help with my dad and brother inlaw doom scrolling Facebook looking up and saying. Did you hear about <right wing propoganda>