With the way elections changed after social media became big. Govts want to have control back, like they did before. And are increasingly curbing open internet with boogeyman CP or terrorists, new fear of mass AI CP. Ultimately we'll get 2nd hand version of great firewall and social credit system. Some "liberal democracies" already have root of such systems implemented.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
I don't know if it has anything to do with changes in elections directly. My government has been talking for a while making the case that social media use makes us dumber, sadder, and more scared. I believe it's true that they also see that playing out in elections, but that's not where they want to solve a problem.
Wouldn't it be strange if solving a problem didn't affect elections?
This has been noticeable since Tahrir square; I used to say that Twitter gives you a revolution whether you need it or not.
But it's becoming increasingly clear how badly compromised the whole thing is with fake opinions and enemy propaganda.
I don't like either of the options. I don't like control by the state, and I don't like control by mad billionaires. I don't like the far right cesspool of 4chan, but can't disagree with their position that they shouldn't have to care about OFCOM.
> I don't like the far right cesspool of 4chan, but can't disagree with their position that they shouldn't have to care about OFCOM.
While I agree with this statement, I thought there was some kind of requirement that OFCOM goes through a process like this before being allowed to ask for a domain to be blocked in the UK?
The latter is, I think, something OFCOM should be allowed to do with a restriction that it can only come after other options fail.
Oh, it's much more stupid than that: OFCOM can't block websites, I just checked and it's available on my phone right now. They've issued a fine to 4chan instead. Which they are ignoring.
Imgur have gone the other direction: they have voluntarily blocked the UK (!), which is very irritating when trying to browse Reddit.
There's certainly a process, but not a good one.
(separate from all this, the Internet Watch Foundation maintains a blocklist which ISPs voluntarily follow, of actual CSAM.)
> OFCOM can't block websites, I just checked and it's available on my phone right now.
Until the process is complete, that's not evidence of inability, that's just the process:
Where appropriate, if a provider fails to comply with its safety duties, we can also seek a court order for ‘business disruption measures’, such as requiring payment providers or advertisers to withdraw their services from a platform, or requiring Internet Service Providers to block a site in the UK.
> There's certainly a process, but not a good one.
Indeed. There does seem to be a mutual non-comprehension of how the internet functions amongst lawmakers and enforcers in both the UK and the USA; both seem to act like they have more sovereignty over the internet than is possible without reaching much faster for a block order for sites outside their respective jurisdictions.
>My government has been talking for a while making the case that social media use makes us dumber, sadder, and more scared. I believe it's true that they also see that playing out in elections, but that's not where they want to solve a problem.
The governments themselves are "dumber, sadder, and more scared". They are worried because social media puts regular people talking on equal footing to official propagandas (being able to reach everybody else). That's what they fear, because they have the lowest approval ratings and legitimization in over half a century, and they're also making everything shittier and shittier to the benefit of their corporate overlords.
You couldn't be more wrong. There's no equal footing when propaganda buys you thousands of bots to parrot what you want on every related post. And there is no ability to "reach everyone" when intransparent algorithms decide what reaches who. Moreover, some kind of content is explicitly suppressed and censored.
Statistics showed that bots don't change opinions. The only reason why certain establishments scream about them is to explain their election losses. People have very deep biases, and 'randos' blabbering online does not change them. It doesn't matter whether those 'randos' are bots or are real.
All of that is still irrelevant if the people can still express themselves. The truth can rise on top of bots.
The problem is the algorithm and the "explicitly suppressed and censored" and that's on the governments and corporations. So that's the worst argument for giving the government more control.
I will agree that governments are happy to bend the knee to corporations. But corporations control social media, so why would the corporations themselves not further their agenda using the platforms they control? Be that simply letting chaos ensue (see the UK Southport riots that were sparked by a "news story" from Pakistan) or from tuning the algorithms directly.
People have control over their government, at least in democracies that are functioning to a basic level (see Hungary recently). But they have zero control over social media, in fact the only organisations that can control global billion dollar tech companies are nation state governments...
they have the lowest approval ratings and legitimization in over half a century, because they're making everything shittier and shittier to the benefit of their corporate overlords.
Via: https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/24452-eu-might-enforce-goog... which specifically quotes the law that should forbid such approach (Article 6(4) DMA) - so EU initiative and engineers consciously and intentionality breaking EU law in the prototype that is supposed to be replicated later.
*invited to attend a hearing* after they could no longer ignore the fact the guy is openly selling (and previously posting) CSAM based on the real kids?
That would be a very gentle way to express hurt feelings, not the way to treat a guy who knowingly does that.
