Everything is a trade off in the world. I think that people who are anti-id ignore this but for me personally it’s harder and harder to accept the trade offs of an internet without id. AI has only accelerated this, I don’t want to live in a world where the average person unknowingly interacts with bots more than other individuals and where black market actors can sway public opinion with armies of bots.

I think most people are aligned here, and that an internet without identification is inevitable whether we like it or not.

Astroturfing was already a thing.

Identification fixes nothing here, you log with your account, plug in the AI.

The problems with social media have nothing to do with ID and everything to do with godawful incentives, the argument seems to be that it's a large price to pay but that it's worth it. Worth it for what? The end result is absolutely terrible either way

1) ID checks will not close the trade off. Real IDs are easily available on the market. Thus criminals will used them no problem. It's the law-abiding privacy-minded people (like me) who would be hurt the most.

2) Your point is valid. I too want to know whether I am engaging with a bot or a person. This is impossible now and it will be impossible once ID check becomes ubiquitous.

3) I will be happy to see (or not) a blue checkmark by the profile name. Just like in Twitter. That's enough.

No the argument is bad actors will reliably find a way to bypass these systems at an industrial scale while you'll instead snag honest people instead.

Look at the facebook real name policy.

100% correct. At this point the harms to children from social media use are very well documented.

Like everything else in society, there are tradeoffs here, I'm much more concerned with the damage done to children's developing brains than I am to violations of data privacy, so I'm okay with age verification, however draconian it may be.

> I think that people who are anti-id ignore this

No we do not.

>I don’t want to live in a world where the average person unknowingly interacts with bots more than other individuals and where black market actors can sway public opinion with armies of bots.

That is not the argument for identification on many places on the internet. It's not even the argument that the gov reps pushing it typically make. And why would it be. The companies that go along with all this don't want to get rid of all bots and public opinion campaigns. They make money off of many of those.

You're not thinking more than one step ahead. If you let a third party define who "has ID", "is human", etc. you give that third party control over you. You already gave control of your attention away to the sites who host the UGC, now you also give away control of your sense of reality.

At any point they can tell a real human what they can and can't say, and if they go against their masters, their "real human" status is revoked, because you trust the platform and not the person.

If we want to go full conspiritard, we could accuse those of wanting to control speech to be the financial backers of those flooding social media with AI slop: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gGLvg0n-uY -- this fictional video thematically marries Metal Gear Solid 2's plot with current events: "perfect AI speech, audio and video synthesis will drown out reality [...] That is when we will present our solution: mandatory digital identity verification for all humans at all times"

(Disclaimer: American perspective)

Why don't we have PKI built in to our birth certificates and drivers licenses? Why hasn't a group of engineers and experts formed a consortium to try and solve this problem in the least draconian and most privacy friendly way possible?

ID verification doesn't protect against that. Why not? Because there are a lot of people that will trade their ID for a small amount of money, or log someone/something in. IDs are for sale, like everyone who was ever a high school student knows for "some" reason.

Plus what you're asking would require international id verification for everyone, which would first mostly make those IDs a lot cheaper. But there's a second negative effect. The organizations issuing those IDs, governments, are the ones making the bot armies. Just try to discuss anything about Russia, or how bad some specific decision of the Chinese CCP is. Or, if you're so inclined: think about how having this in the US would mean Trump would be authorizing bot armies.

This exists within China, by the way, and I guarantee you: it did not result in honest online discussion about goods, services or politics. Anonymity is required.