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Comment by qwertox | Hacker News Reader

I've been thinking about this some time now. But not from the aspect of sovereignty.

Assume a group builds a social network just like Twitter, but with verified users, actually verified, possibly via personal ID / passport maybe at the town hall, no alias allowed, but the legal name, people will know who you are. All publicly readable without account.

This would give politicians, companies, journalists and citizens a way to have public "conversations", near real-time news updates just like on Twitter, but without the huge amount of garbage that comes from bots and people eagerly destroying the public discourse. Illegal comments (my mistake, criminal content) lead to direct consequences, maybe also with the one of setting the account to read-only mode.

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You've not made an honest negative Google Maps review in Europe yet. I've received a takedown notice with threat of Lawyers.

Also, the UK/French and possibly other governments want to be able to read private messages and have law-enforcement tools made for free for them.

Public Opinion is free to issue in the EU, but doesn't go unpunished. Here an example and long legal battle most of us can't afford this famous talk show moderator had to face due to "Insulting a Majesty", the turkish president.

Don't even think of encryption, governments will request you build in backdoors for them. Social Networking is strictly controlled and locked down in the EU, hard to develop and maintain a product that you as a founder can goto jail for, if your users insult a majesty in some country.

A law had to be "cancelled" to repeal the extradition of Jan Böhmermann into prison in Turkey.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%C3%B6hmermann_affair

- https://www.bundestag.de/webarchiv/textarchiv/2017/kw22-de-m...

No DM, no need for encryption of messages. All conversation is public. Takedown notices will be from a real company or a real person to another real entity: if they're right, it has to be taken down. If not, not. I mean, the law would be pretty clear on that and if not, that would be a good time to set a precedence.

If Böhmermann wants to publish attacking satire, I guess it would stay up until courts decide otherwise.

Facebook and Google+ tried to do this with their realname policies. It doesn't work as well as one would expect:

• Toxic assholes are not deterred by their name being attached to what they're saying, because they think they're saying righteous things and/or fighting bad people who don't deserve any respect.

• People self-censor, because they don't want to risk upsetting some random violent stranger on the internet who can track them down.

• People who don't use their legal name publicly have trouble participating. This impacts transgender people, but also people using stage names/pen names, and stalking victims.

I think OP's point isn't to prevent toxic assholes from saying whatever righteous things and fighting whatever bad fight, but to limit bot/inorganic/foreign contributions from made up people - basically to make it "one person one voice".

I kind of like the idea of "one person one voice", but I have two problems with it, which I think will block me from accepting it.

One is that the cost of it seems much too high, even if you can change it to allow the use of chosen aliases (I don't think it matters what a "one person one voice" system calls an authenticated member). I don't really trust everyone who I have to give my ID details too, and this is just one more bit of stress for so little gain.

The second is that the benefits will never be realised. In an election, one person one vote doesn't work when half the population doesn't vote; you need almost everyone to come, otherwise it's the strongest opinions not the mainstream opinions that dominate. And I'm quite sure we'll see the exact same thing here, but in spades, and faster. If you don't like the opinion, you just don't show up. Once the centre of the social media is sufficiently different from the centre of the community, there will be the sort of bullying and self censorship you foresee and it will spiral out of control.

There's no need for real names, what is needed is that you can't create multiple accounts. This can be done without linking identities by using two unrelated parties. Party A is the platform and B is the authenticator, when creating an account on A you are sent to B to authenticate your identity and get a token to finish your account creation on A. As long as A and B are separate, A never knows the identity of the user and B doesn't know what the user represents himself on A.

People wouldn't use it, because Europe does censor speech. A German man was arrested for calling the vice chancellor an idiot, a British teen arrested for citing rap lyrics etc. The platform would be dead on arrival.

As a Spaniard, I will just wipe down my arse with your 1984-like comment. The least I want it's surveillance, neither from corporations nor from goverments.

That's how you get mafias for free.

So what do you propose? That your king posts a comment and a troll brigade floods the thread?

You're free to link to his posts (or copy them) from the new network on Twitter if that gives you the kind of discourse you prefer.

What do I propose? FFS, I don't trust neither the leftist populists using sexism hysteria for its own profit nor the right wing 'everyone to the left it's either a Stalinist/Marxist/Terrorist'... for their own profit, too while they do tons of money laundering. And don't let me start on our Catholic Churches and lobbies.

So, get these lobbies out there right now.

> So what do you propose? That your king posts a comment and a troll brigade floods the thread?

Twitter is a broken model you are trying to fix with draconian surveillance.

Politicians/Statesman/ Corporations should not be on my 'social network'. They make a press release with their PR or do an interview and journalists should report on it.

My 'social network' should be my family, friends, neighbours, maybe some local social groups in my city.

This idea of immediate, direct communication from companies and governments is not a workable model with our social fabric.

> Assume a group builds a social network just like Twitter, but with verified users, actually verified

Facebook tried this and as far as I can remember it was found illegal in Europe for a social network to require people to upload their ID, or use their real names.

I am not saying upload something and have the social network verify the identity. Maybe something like VideoIdent/IDnow could work. Basically: Get a license to comment, the way you get a license to drive.

I mean, this should not replace Twitter, but offer a less harassing environment.

What about if we leverage existing systems, say DNS and domains? Kind of lets people verify things belong to some known entity, and legal system already handles conflicts in the domain world, in case someone tries to impersonate and so on.

We need pseudonymity. Access only by court order like phone numbers.

Why? There's nothing to gain from it. You'd have to stand by your word on that network.

Good luck with your Stasi/Gestapo wannabes there. We are fed up with neocons, fascists and stalinists.

Perfect, then it's simply not for people like you. But you’re still free to read along if you're interested in what others have to say.

There is. A troll brigade from Yekaterinburg can’t just hop on and do their jobs. Hate speech can’t be freely spread.

Forgive me if I'm not interested in such a platform. Here are some examples of "hate speech" in Europe:

British teen arrested for quoting rap lyrics.[0]

German man arrested for calling the vice chancellor an idiot ("dumkopf").[1]

French woman charged with insulting the president and faces a fine of $13,000.[2]

>In March 2018, Hasél was convicted by Spanish Special Court Audiencia Nacional in Madrid to a two-year prison sentence and a fine of €24,300 for insulting and slandering the Crown and using the King's image (for which he was ordered to pay a fine), for insulting and slandering State institutions (for which he was also ordered to pay a fine); /.../ The song was titled Juan Carlos el Bobón, which roughly translates as Juan Carlos the Clown, a wordplay on the former king's actual name, Juan Carlos de Borbón. In the song, Hasél recounts the former king's numerous scandals in a chronological order.[3]

[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-merseyside-43816921

[1] https://www.ft.com/content/27626fa8-3379-4b69-891d-379401675...

[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattnovak/2023/03/30/woman-face...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pablo_Has%C3%A9l

You wouldn’t be able to post there as an American.

I don't think this attitude is going to create the next big social media platform.

Which is possible with domains, even anonymity is possible, with the right registrar.

You want to be able to have alts. So if you can easily get as many domains as you want, sure.

You get a lot of hate for this, but I think it makes a lot of sense. I wouldn't post there, but I am interested in reading discussions between politicians, journalists and scientists without all the fluff, ragebait, memes, spam and misinformation spread by bots and influencers collecting followers.

This kind of sounds like what you propose. Except maybe even more locked down

Stripe Identity is 1.25 € per verification.

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