The coming automation of propaganda

What about gay teenagers growing up in disapproving community, people in abusive relationships, etc who need advice and support?

It is a slippery slope from regulating "hateful garbage" (to be explicit, I interpret this to include speech that is not necessarily hate speech) to censorship of whatever the state determines to be wrongthink.

I'll take my anonymity where I can get it, thanks. And as an aside, it's somewhat ironic you post this on a throwaway.

>As U.S. policymakers remain indecisive over how to prevent a repeat of the 2016 election interference, the threat is looming ever more ominous on the horizon.

That interference is specious, I think. In any case, the US interferes in every election it can, so is it unreasonable to believe every other country that can interfere would?

>You probably know enough to avoid following small, suspicious accounts on Twitter or browsing links to sites of which you’ve never heard.

I suppose ''surfing the web'' is truly dead, then. This seems to me like an article written for sheep.

>The second vulnerability is a legal system with numerous blind spots that lawmakers should close. Reddit is the third-most-popular social media site on the Internet, surpassing Facebook among American Internet users. It is also shockingly vulnerable, requiring only an e-mail address to register an account. Consequently, anyone could theoretically register an unlimited number of accounts and, being careful not to stand out to system administrators, effectively control conversations on whatever topics they want.

So, here's the meat of this garbage, then, in which it reveals its ulterior motive. Yes, Reddit is the Wild West, only requiring an email instead of the socially acceptable email, phone, government ID, etc.

>The third vulnerability is online anonymity. While we absolutely do not advocate for de-anonymizing the Internet, it is now so influential over American society that legislators should not leave regulation to social media platforms alone. Congress should put more pressure on social media companies to ensure their users are, at a minimum, who they say they are.

Well, what I was going to write about this issue, after reading just the first few paragraphs, should then be a response to this nonsense. As an aside, there is no ''Who they say they are'' in a truly anonymous system.

I was going to suggest anonymity, true anonymity, as a solution to this issue. I prefer those venues where there are no names attached and one can't tell even if multiple messages are sent by the same person. When you have a discussion in this way, you only judge each message on its own merit. There is no ''Gee, this can't be a bot or government agent, since this guy has a history.'' or any such thing. So, if it seems a great many messages have been made in support of something that isn't usually in the venue, such as a political candidate, say, it seems fair to regard it as astroturfing. When no one or few have a face, it's harder to astroturf, if only because everyone will constantly be on edge and are less likely to be swayed by a few messages. Not only that, but since none or few of the real users have identities, you can't target them with specialized messages or track them or other such things.

Anyway, what a terrible article, ironically submitted by someone with an account less than a day old. I almost wish I could make a living writing such cheap garbage, but I figure it would eventually get to me.

> It's time for real world identity linked accounts for participating in online conversations.

You might be able to implement this in a small, affluent European country, but nowhere else. Consider the fact that in the USA, it is a standard talking point of the left that the right's continual push to ask for ID to _vote_ has been branded as a racist policy; it seems that we're simply to accept that large swathes of people will simply not have any ID, whether they're legally present in the country or not.

How do you suggest solving that problem, so as to have some actual decent ID on file with which to back the online ID upon?

And, once you've solved that, how are you going to scale it to impoverished countries that barely have the infrastructure to have any internet access at all, never mind vetting everyone's access to it?

Once you have this ID system, how are you going to mandate that all websites validate access against it? Enforce it at the ISP level? How are people going to offer wifi in coffee shops, etc? Force everything through a big proxy? The scale and expense of the infrastructure involved in doing this is immense. Government IT efforts seem to fail more often than not these days - witness the failures to improve the IRS, or the recent Canadian government payroll system implementation scandal with IBM.

> Second, it reduces the need for online censorship beyond what is required by law.

In America, you have absolute freedom of speech, save of course for speech that is treasonous (i.e. divulging classified information). There is no requirement to censor by law. If someone wants to issue speech you consider hateful, it is not illegal for them to do so. This is not true many other places, and unfortunately may change in the USA at some point in our lifetimes ending one of the greatest freedoms that anyone has ever possessed out of our fear that somehow freedom is going to be what leads to our oppression, and not the giving of too much power to the state. Ironic; even more ironic that the left is the group most siding with big corporations to push this narrative. Never thought I'd see that; not after Occupy Wall Street, but that spirit is thoroughly dead.

> So much of the hateful garbage posted online is only posted in the first place because of anonymity. Remove that, we probably don't get that posting in the first place so we can avoid the messy issue of enforced top down censorship.

Right, because self-imposed censorship where we all go through the day with a fake smile on our faces, only saying the right things, like as though the things we feel safe saying on LinkedIn is sufficient to cover all legitimate human dialogue. Say the wrong thing and disappear into a Kafka-esque nightmare, where you can never get the complete list of all the things you can't say because such a list would be even more dangerous than what you were planning to say in the first place...

No, friend. You're wrong.

Anonymity and free speech are the incredible power to bring light to darkness. They're what enables us to be more than the sum of our parts; what lets those unfortunate in appearance have equal footing to those who are attractive, what lets those who are disabled keep up with athletes. It's what lets us find corruption and root it out more effectively than ever before, and it is this spirit of taking down evil people that is going to be crushed by ideas like yours, not the actual evils that lurk within the hearts of men.