I've often wanted real name policies for writing and anonymity for reading. And I don't think bans are the way to go, I think one should just shift the norms on this so that it becomes easy to verify an identity and therefore easy to see which ones are anonymous. The problem right now is that real identity and anonymous blend together, so anonymous can pretend to be real, which might seem even more so in the age of AI.

I wonder if there are different levels to this: 1) real identity/name 2) humanness 3) completely anonymous.

(definitely open to other suggested levels)

For example, if someone is posting on the internet with a real name, I want them to actually be that person. If they're posting with a username, I mostly just want them to be a human. I don't know how much I'd be open to it being hard to know whether it was a human or bot.

With regards to reading stats, public or private, I'd still like to know whether human vs bot. I think YouTube and Twitter/X and IG and all these platforms have been gamed by lots of bots pretending to be unique humans and those stats get wildly out of touch with how many humans actually interact (which I think matters for true popularity and advertising and basic understanding of social interactions).

I think the challenge is if it's real identity, often it doesn't split between real identity and simple proof of humanity. Maybe it's not that easy from a tech standpoint, and maybe it's because companies would want to track every move and people want privacy, but maybe it'd be easier if more people wanted it.

So I wonder how to balance this.

I'm curious to hear your thoughts.

A lot of the local newspapers have abandoned third party comments systems and gone for only allowing comments under full verified name (often using the national id system). The result is that only the trolls and and generic perspectives anyone could have reasoned their way to possibly existing in less than 5 minutes remain. The ones willing to provide entertainment in the form of vigorously refuting the more extreme viewpoints are gone, because who wants to needlessly antagonize the likely crazy, and the interesting tangents are also mostly gone.

If you want to use social media to chill out with your friends, real name mandates for writing can work, at least as long as the content is not too publicly accessible. But if you want to have more interesting conversations than the ones you can have in the local park where you need to watch out for not publicly denouncing the sport favoured by your peers and neighbours in favour of something locally exotic, real name by default will more or less wipe them out.

As for proof of humanness it sounds interesting, but I think it's insufficient. Much like I dislike promotions of interests which are not my own as much when they are done by a human handing out fliers vs a poster showing the same advertisement, I don't think that the sender of the message being a paid or otherwise recruited human is going to make the desirable difference on social media either, even if they're known to be human.

What's really needed is a signal that the content is the persons genuine personal input, and comes without an ulterior agenda. And if such a signal can exist I'd very much like to be able to use it when navigating the physical world as well.

Mitsotakis (The Prime Minister) and his Political Party (New Democracy - the name is probably the irony of the story -) were spying their political opponents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Greek_surveillance_scanda... using Predator Spying software.

No surprise here

He spied members of Parliament in 2022 and recently exposed a part of their corruption to the media. The ultimate goal is to turn the people against them and prepare for a reduction in their number and role.

In a corrupt government, as they are almost all globally, the less state the better.

Divide and conquer.

While I agree with less state, most people refuse to take responsibility for own action and keep playing game by voting for them. Doesn't matter what side, it keeps behemot runnng. But people suffering.

Nobody went to jail - he didn't even quit when the scandal broke. That is Greece in 2026.

There are more ofc:

- https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/apr/06/greek-pm-vows-...

- https://www.euractiv.com/news/top-greek-court-under-fire-aft...

- http://pamfleti.net/english/bota/skandali-me-fondet-e-be-se-...

The guy must be the best PM Greece had in the last 100 years, if not in it's whole modern history. He pushed Greece from bottom to top of Europe. He is just insanely unlucky: since his service the Western world had crumbled: that train accident, Covid, Ukraine, Iran, inflation. We laugh saying that a meteorite impact is pending soon. Let's look at what NASA has to say.

NASA is too busy "making Pluto great again"

The guy is a clown

He didn't even quit when 57 people tried in a train crash because the collision warning system had never come online. Instead, they immediately sent the fire department to cover up the site of the accident so that nobody would discover the vats of benzoyl that were to be used in fuel adulteration the train was illegally carrying.

Well, in the US we had organizations that aren’t supposed to spy on citizens actually spy on Congress members! Nixon was impeached for much less… but I guess once we passed into the new millennium all bets were off starting with Carnivore but eventually into spying on Congress members…

How close are we to a third party with sufficient compute being able to mass-de-anonymize social media? What happens if they republish social media feeds with identity probabilities? Do we reach a point where the internet is anonymous to casual users but not to large corporations or governments? Presumably someone is already selling identity-labelling as a service?

Amusingly, (locally generated) LLM text becomes an anonymity mask in those scenarios.

See http://arxiv.org/abs/2602.16800

And http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755016

Also http://github.com/antirez/hnstyle

Glhf

I use real name here and posted about pending litigation once. An insurance settlement was offered a week later. Socials are scraped to build profiles for these scenarios. People engaged in fraud tend to blab about it and many business are interested in having such evidence accessible. It can be useful to exploit that system to your advantage when the truth is on your side.

I was thinking about this the other day, using LLM text to thwart stylometric analysis. At some point, I'd read about using machine translations to do the same thing (translating a text to, for example. Chinese then back to English). This seems to only work if the translation method isn't quite perfect so get an "Engrish" effect or the like. But you could probably feed your manifesto or whatever to one of the various modern chatbots and have it rewrite it in the style of Poe or Pynchon or maybe a generic business email. (Obviously, setting aside the issue of if the chatbot is keeping all this stuff in a database somewhere).

i've wondered the same recently and came across this resource:

https://www.whonix.org/wiki/Surfing_Posting_Blogging#Stylome...

tl;dr intentionally writing in a different style is very effective and overall the best option

btw one upside to public content being ingested in LLM training data. is that certain writing styles (like using the emdash) become much more common, due to reappearing in generated content. this means that if you continue to write in that style, you will blend in more easily. which makes your own content resist stylometric analysis

Just as close we were 10 years ago.

CIA has always had this privelege.

Ancient Greece did not have agents crawling peoples stuff for profiling. The argument is broken.

It didn't have bot swarms either.

Bots are now clearly joining the Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalyp...) to hasten the demise of civil liberty.

I think individuals have the right to hide from government bot swarms.

[delayed]

It's not an argument, it's a soundbite aimed at convincing people who don't like thinking.

How do you define ‘to like thinking’? Particularly given all the automatism evident in humanity’s actions? Is thinking observation or performing decisions? Is it the act of deciding or the act of interpreting… as one is apriori, the other A posterior.

Are you implying only people who like thinking should be given right to vote or people who like thinking are naturally more inclined to not favor privacy?

Your statements are no less a bite, brother Ставрос. What makes you feel so confident I your superiority?

Also, ancient Greece has slaves that let citizens participate in democracy full time. Which menas that decisions were more informed that we have nowadays.

A fact very often overlooked. One thing we can argue about is that we now have slaves called agents.

Agents take care of your family?

"Greece does not understand Democracy." - Publius.

Hamilton, is that you?

I'd say that they should imitate not Lycurgus, but rather Pericles.

How would this impact platforms like Reddit or HN?

When it comes to forcing platforms outside of Greece to comply with this, those platforms will just close their service down to Greece.

If you want to talk about the concept itself of removing anonymity: on HN the impact would not be huge, a lot of us are not really anonymous with links to personal sites in our profiles. Reddit is a different beast entirely.

I do wonder how easy it is to de-anonymise a typical reddit user based on topics, ways of writing, time of writing etc. throw into some form of pattern recognition and see if it links up with other reddit accounts, accounts on forums, things like Facebook etc.

Throw in information Reddit has (ip addresses, user agents etc) and it’s no doubt a certainty.

You would probably get the right person in a list of candidates that would be too long to be useful.

huh it is actually the opposite direction, low recall and high precision.

once again getting the right answer on the internet is posting a wrong one assertively :) thanks

Or they'll leave their services open to Greece. They don't have a physical presence there and aren't subject to their laws.

You don't need a physical presence to be subject to another country's laws. Disobeying a judicial order would be grounds for issuing a warrant which could easily be expanded to an international warrant for the owners of the platform.

The "judicial order" in the first place violates the first amendment, which isn't binding on Greece, but is binding on the nature of any extradition order they wish to seek in the USA.

Don't think that will happen, they will probably tell their ISP's to block access t those sites.

Then they will be blocked & only accessible via VPN

Greece may come after Reddit Netherlands B.V., though.

I know that it's not popular here but I appreciate the anonymity of 4chan. With no user ids no one is harvesting karma/reputation and so you get to read some of what to me are truly alien perspectives. I'm normally pretty positive about people (some would call me naive) but 4chan lets me see how there are some true monsters out there and that I could be interacting with them in real life. But yeah, I understand what Greece is trying to do - I just don't think it'll be possible to enforce it.

This whole concept of usernames instead of real names creates something I've lost complete trust in. With 4chan, you know exactly what you are getting. But with say Reddit, people game the system creating fake accounts that pretend to be real people having ideas and opinions that aren't paid for. It's getting hard to find places where this in-between state (usernames) aren't destroying the platform.

This sounds great on paper but only if democracy and checks and balances are in order...

The more government controls, the more checks and balances evolve into paychecks and hidden bank balances.

Government can do a lot of things to you when it controls a lot of things.

And what government is doing is harder to see when it's doing millions of things.

a functioning government isn't the problem, but a government selling out to corporations is

Wouldn't accept such a piece of paper even for toilet use. Anonymity strips egos and forces arguments stand on their own merit.

>This sounds great on paper but only if democracy

Why is it great that you should be completely deprived of the right to anonymous online communication just because a bunch of people voted on it? Democracy without rights is just mob rule.

with the caveat that I think this should only apply to social media in the strong sense of that term, that is platforms where you present with an identity and that function as public squares, you having any rights is conditional on you being a citizen in the first place.

Given the country in question, if you lived in a Greek polis participating in democratic debate required you to share the same national identity, anonymous-guy#500 from the polis down the street never had any rights to participate. That's not mob rule but the opposite. It's precisely in the mob where anonymity facilitates violence.

with how things currently are it certainly feels like mob rule in the west. a bunch of elites set the prices on things to be unaffordable for the masses and adequate regulation is notably absent

Πάντα πρωτοπόροι στη μλκ.

This will be very interesting to observe. Social media is a cesspool and getting worse by the minute. Even hacker news is being inundated with bots. On controversial topics tons of new accounts appear arguing divisively both sides of the argument.

It’s clear that nefarious regimes have won on social media.

It would be interesting to understand the ratio of real human posts to manipulation on twitter for example - I’d imagine it has long ago tipped to majority bot.

Tackling this problem is existential for western democracies. This seems like a reasonable idea. There might be other options (like validated but anonymous) but we have to try something.

It’s worth noting too that many strong western democracies have laws around hate speech and libel that are being broken by anonymous people online - and the citizens of those countries are perfectly happy with those laws.

One country (Greece) with an ineffective law will have negligible impact on the entire internet. Are there popular Greek-only social medias?

More generally, many people spew toxicity under the real name. And there’s already nothing stopping a social media from only allowing verified users.

Hate speech and libel laws have already been misused against people who didn’t actually “hate” or lie. Even if Western democracies are falling, this could make them fall faster, so IMO we should try better ideas first.

Yes but for Greeks it will have an impact and we can determine if it’s beneficial.

We already know the answer.. it's totalitarian bullshit and/or sheer incompetency to make motion appear like progress.

We don't need to "try" botulism either.

How do we know that? Honest question. Anonymity is just not a feature of normal political or civil life in most countries. In fact it can often be contrary to civility. I don't see why removing Anonymity and preventing foreign meddling in ones country is a bad thing.

Who's "we?" There is no shared or special knowledge, but any superficial application of critical thinking reaches obvious conclusions quickly. I can only inform from my perspective but cannot think for you.

There are costs to open societies... like people being jerks.

Closed societies deny anonymity and are able to punish dissent and opposition easily because they know what everyone is doing at almost all times. Speech ceases to be free which repression becomes rampant.

Pick 1. There is no perfect but don't let perfection be the enemy of the good.

This is a pretty incoherent comment. You realize you mentioned “we” first so calling me out for using inclusive language doesn’t really make any sense. As for the rest of it, it’s all super basic half baked ideas that even to discuss we would have to spend 10x the amount of characters defining what nonsense you are talking about.

In retrospect I should not have made this comment, I was frustrated and replied rudely.

I think that there are many points to address in your comment, not least the definition of "open" and "closed" societies. But anonymous and non-anonymous do not correspond with open and closed. We aren't talking about "people being jerks" we are talking about nation-state adversaries controlling democracies by sock puppeting and astroturfing and other nefarious means of control. These were not attack vectors before we had social media (or at least were much less potent - a letter to the editor from a. non.) but they have become serious ways to influence populations and control narratives. This is bad. This is an existential issue for modern western democracies exactly because they are open liberal societies. If we lived in autocracies it wouldn't matter because we wouldn't have any influence.

It's incredible how much I can agree with you yet still be revolted beyond measure that I'd have to have my every word online tracked by governments. They are fundamentally untrustable agents, with incredible state powers & a monopoly on force that they regularly abuse. Them demanding access to knowing every word that every person writes is not ok.

But the us gov already knows everything you type online - Snowden told us that years ago - they have a direct pipe from all the major internet companies.

So this is just attempting to regain control of the internet for democracies that are not the US. It’s not going to fix Russia or the US but maybe it will fix Greece at negligible cost.

If this problem can actually be solved (requirement for both anonymity and ID in different spaces online without AI infiltration), it appears to be a long road to get there...

Facebook's real name policy did nothing to stop it being a cesspool. I don't expect that this will have a positive effect on public discourse.

>It would be interesting to understand the ratio of real human posts to manipulation on twitter for example - I’d imagine it has long ago tipped to majority bot.

The vast majority of bots are government funded. Banning anonymity will just mean people only see bots funded by their own government and its allies, making it even more one-sided (because their own government will almost certainly still have the ability to make bots, like in Chinese internet).

Excluding foreign influence is still a huge win.

Having external actors take control of your democracy is the nightmare scenario - which Ancient Greeks had first hand experience of.

I wonder how they plan to implement that on decentralized social networks such as Nostr. I assume targeting big centralized networks such as X and Facebook is good enough.

> I assume targeting big centralized networks such as X and Facebook is good enough.

Exactly, and make non-anon networks the norm enough so that most people will never trust anything said on fringe social networks.

The whole point of networks like Nostr is to bypass things like this. Given how they've failed to kill torrents in spite of decades of trying, they probably won't be able to kill decentralized social networks either.

Culturally, is Greece really sensitive? Honest question.

>We can't determine who is talking about those pesky Epstein files and shut them up!

Yeah, it's toxic behavior, I'm sure of it.

I don't think they want people to discuss anything like the Panama Papers again, ever

I foresee a lot of people's dead relative's being used to push Russian talking points in the future

Edit: not sure why the downvotes, this will absolutely spur a black market for identities that less than reputable actors will exploit; just like those shady free VPNs that will use your computer as an exit node for their residential proxy network

Why not!

In the US, AI incarnations of dead kids are used to lobby congress[]. You can resurrect the brutally murdered 10 year old Uzi Garcia, who's hobbies were "football, swimming, and video games" to do his actual secret hobby which is doing the political bidding of adults and talking to congressman. There is literally a button on the page to let this AI resurrected dead relative to talk to congress.

[] https://theshotline.org

It's what they would've wanted.

No need to dress it up as think of the children anymore!

I don't think we ought to ban anonymity, but I think we should make it a requirement for social networks to display country of origin. Unfortunately that's impossible because of VPNs. Perhaps a system where you're identity is verified by a third party, all documents erased, but leaves you with a permanent token that allows you to authenticate as a citizen of some country.

The upcoming EU digital wallets in theory could do this kind of thing. They're focused on anonymity preserving age verification right now, but exposing any other government-verified attribute anonymously should be equally possible, including residency and/or citizenship if that's your bag.

I'm extremely mixed on it, overall I expect incredibly over-demanding asks from websites, but Digital Credential API likewise allows for various scoped requests/disclosures. https://developer.chrome.com/blog/digital-credentials-api-sh...

Most of the facts exposed are likely inferable anyway, or certainly were in a non-GDPR tracking world. I think it'd be clear from my browsing patterns that I'm over 18, and broad tracking + IP checks could quite easily infer where I actually live at least to a national level, I'd be confident that e.g. Meta already know this without being told. Given that, I'm not too worried about exposing residency + over-18 status, the fingerprinting bits are redundant.

Whether it's actually anonymous in practice, and/or whether it starts to go further than that (websites asking for verified gender? First name? City? Full DOB?) will be a real concern but I think there'd be plenty of push back and tech will end up setting norms here through the browser APIs & permissions prompts. In theory in this is all covered under GDPR anyway so requesting or storing information that's not necessary is illegal anyway, and at least explicit requests are less secret than invisible tracking of the same thing - much easier to reject individually, and to litigate abuse collectively.

Great idea. Next step: internet visas.

Want to read a forum in another country? Please submit your application, wait 3–5 business days, and dont forget to declare your browsing intent.

It is a great idea. Most radicalization on the hard-left and hard-right are done by state actors (like China/Pakistan/Russia) because we're not doing anything about it. Perhaps if Joe Smalls in Kentucky and Samantha Milton in Minnesota were not radicalized to hate each other via state actors in social media messages, there would be better discourse and fewer Trumps / Bidens in office.

Most radicalization is actually done by the three letter agencies. They find a mentally deficient, convince them to participate in some concocted plot then arrest them to pad their stats. The FBI agent got congress to give him a new office after he got the homeless guy to try to kidnap Whitmer.

This is grand coming from the current Greek government. It is an open secret in Greece that the ruling party has been funding and running an army of anonymous internet trolls called Omada Alithias (loose translation: Truth Strike Team) for more than 10 years.

Incidentally (?), on April 26 there was the first conviction for one their trolls, writing on X as GheorghyZhukov. The real identity of the troll was established on trial, and he was convicted for slander and defamation. So maybe the feel that they may soon lose control of the online narrative, so they hope to create a chilling effect for online criticism via banning anonymity?

I feel reasonably sure that in that direction lies fascism or communism.

Those are the two political systems under which individuals are not meant to have any secrets from the government...

Feels like people will find a workaround and it’ll be another waste of taxpayer money

Why not go ahead and just ban all bad things?

I mean, Greece can:

Ban poverty, ban hunger, ban bad sleeping habits.

Ban corruption, ban people saying bad things.

Ban pseudonyms in history books too, wouldnt want anyone hiding behind a pen name.

Ban whistleblowing.

Ban dissent, just to be safe.

Boiling frog. You need to do it piece by piece to have confirmed public.

The recipient of bad news wants the bearer of bad news gone.

>The major problem behind anonymity is toxicity – anyone, especially on social media, can smear an individual and carry out character assassination without facing any consequences

It works on government too! Greece is the weakest country in the EU. Their chief export is currently stupid ideas, their chief import is poverty. They could improve themselves with some democratic choices but instead they choose to stay at the end of the line.

anonymity doesn't cause toxicity. at best - mildly encourages it

Remember. Even if they succeed in banning internet anonymity, you should still smear crooked politicians. Just do it anyway.

Real name policies don't work either. Some of the world's biggest trolls don't just troll under their real name, they actually own some of the networks.