identify verification when you create your account. charge a small fee when you create your account.
>Consequently, I think instead of trying to solve the issue of bots, it's more important to start educating people that just because they read something on the internet does not mean it's true
now THERE is a problem that cannot be solved!
It's impossible to take everything critically, and honestly few will. So the entity with the largest bot army still has the longest propaganda lever.
Twitter and the other social networks know who is a bot, or else they haven't bothered looking. Something needs to force them to act.
I do see one mechanism: the bots go too far, and users don't want to be on a platform where they just interact with bots, so they go to more curated places to get their fill. So the business health of the platform depends on having trust. FB has a leg up on this since your friend list probably has people you've actually met. There the problem is your gullible friend forwarding you crap. A deputized bot, if you will. No level of education helps there.
When I speak of bots, I am implicitly speaking of the inevitable adaptions to any sort of attempt to crack down on them. I do agree with you that right now many bots can be detected pretty easily. But that's largely because they have no reason to disguise the fact that they're a bot. In many ways, I think the current system is more desirable. As bots progress to actually trying to emulate human behavior it's going to result in the sort of paranoia you see on many forums today where individuals call one another 'shills' as a means of expressing disagreement. And ultimately, I do not think it will be at all difficult to pass a heavily crippled turing test of 140 character unidirectional messaging.
This sounds somewhat patronizing (the first part in particular), but falling victim to confirmation bias is something we all do. When ideas fit our own personal biases, we tend to become much less critical of them. For instance animal testing, when visible, is something very few people can emotionally accept. And there have been countless hoaxes [1] where people will share an image of an animal in one context (such as a rabbit suffering from severe hair less / skin damage at a veterinarian) and then claim it's an image of the result of a named shampoo company testing their products on animals. It gets people riled up and interested in stopping animal testing, but the problem is that it's completely fake. This is an obvious example but the exact same is true of words themselves and it spreads into everything -- most notably politics.
It's in many ways bizarre that we don't deal with this issue as a part of basic education. Imagery or messages designed to spark an emotional response are very effective against people who are not aware of what's happening. At the same time, they can be rendered far less potent by simply educating people about these tools of manipulation and giving them a wide swath of examples. In today's ever more connected world, with ever more people looking to shall we say 'utilize' other people, the complete neglect of this social skill in education today is perplexing.
[1] - https://speakingofresearch.com/2017/05/16/context-matters-ho...