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Astroturfing will still be a thing after ID. What, you think the government is going to go after their own bot armies?
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I think it would be a lot more difficult for anyone to do and it isn’t like people will be using government platforms at least not in the west

>I think it would be a lot more difficult for anyone to do

Why? Like, what makes you think that?


Because of ID tracking? Say you have attach your government approved ID to use social media. It is now trivial to check how many accounts you have made and how much you have posted. You certainly can't be posting faster than the fastest typist in the world. And if you're mostly just copy pasting, is the quality of the posts actually worth engaging with?

While I am not against internet ID, there is a case to be made for social media for the harms they are causing.


It is now trivial to check how many posts many people in social media make with their own accounts, and astroturfing campaigns still happen.

Why would social media companies fight against this? They, much like the public actually like the engagement. That is the whole problem.

Look at X, where you can now see where people are posting from, do people honestly engage with the feature? No, they don't bother to check if they agree with the content and they use it as an excuse to dismiss in bad faith if they don't like the content.

This is not a control problem, social media networks are not at a loss of options in how to engage with this, they don't want to, the point can be made that states might want to fix this and are unable to, but if that was actually the case there's half a dozen better ways to do that, among them, banning the services.

The idea that the entirety of the population ought to throw privacy away so people can still browse Instagram is repugnant to me.


Let's say the government issues hundreds of thousands of IDs to people who don't exist and uses them to verify bots (or room full of paid humans) that post pro-government messages all day, at "normal" rates that a human posts.

It's amazing how there is a much larger crowd, of completely real people, who approve of the government, than those nasty dissenters. We know they're real people because we trust the government vouching for its own IDs.

And because of the real ID policy, the government can also ask the social media company for the ID used by opposed posters, and find out where they live and "visit" them, maybe "warn" them.

Hooray for democracy!




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