Can you imagine if anonymous social media was allowed to influence elections?

This sounds a lot like “I’m immune to propaganda”.

You… do understand that the point is the problems with our social media and our geopolitics, right? It’s not something that’s gonna actually change.

It’s more like a trusted authority would know your name and your pseudonym, and only your pseudonym and your country or county would display online.

They’d make sure you’re not using ten accounts to reinforce each other, and make sure you’re representing the country you say you are. Ideally, like medical records, the more detailed information would be secret.

All anonymous social media threatens democracy.

I’ve done my best over the years, but regular people can’t compete with the resources of a nation-state that decides to go on a social media influence campaign. No matter how right you are, it’s near impossible to win over public opinion while having 20 times your numbers arguing against you, bandwagoning, and “helping” you by creating easily defeatable strawmans.

It’s really hard to be outnumbered in an argument and then also argue with your “allies” that no, that’s not what you meant. And when the average third party reads over all of that, what are the odds they pick out your small part? You need those odds to be around 70% or more, and they’re just not.

And that’s if you don’t just get banned by hostile moderators. I don’t know if you’re aware of how most moderators are chosen, but it’s not a job interview. And if it is a job interview, it’s in Mandarin or Russian. Even if it’s a legit mod, they’re going to be one of those average third parties that have been subject to all those other arguments.

Today someone said, “Burn the (US) Democratic party to the ground”. That’s so hard to deal with. There are two parties in the US, and you chose that statement?!? The prevailing sentiment spreads. There are valid criticisms to make of the Democratic party, absolutely. Those criticisms needs to be targeted, well-researched, and specific if they’re going to be helpful. So you’re one or ten or a hundred people trying to improve the shitshow. Meanwhile there’s a mix of natural sentiment, seeded sentiment, and fake sentiment making arguments all over the spectrum for your side, and their number in the tens or hundreds or thousands. And that’s before you get to the actual opposing side, which has its own, similar nuances and outnumbering tactics.

Oh, and don’t forget, you’re not immune to the tide. They’ll feed you false information that aligns with your arguments just to discredit you. Something like “Lottery winner pays 70% in tax. Only billionaire to be taxed properly.” That’s not how that works. They pay the same 37% or whatever top marginal rate everyone else does (and then state).

I think it’s possible to have pseudo-anonymous social media, but some authority has to know who you are and where you’re from. The giveaways of propaganda Twitter posts with Russian flags were a clumsy mistake and unlikely to continue voluntarily. Whoever that authority is will be uncomfortable for us, but the only reason we’re comfortable without verification is that we’re used to it.

We have roughly three million ways to say “US bad” right now, and you pick a less than true one.

US government data collection is not on the scale of China. The US is limited in what it gets from companies. China is absolutely not.

Yes, the US should absolutely have more data protection laws. The EU is better. China is absolutely not.