Greece to ban anonymity on social media (www.euractiv.com)
from throws_lemy@lemmy.nz to world@lemmy.world on 28 Apr 16:51
https://lemmy.nz/post/37026526

#world

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markz@suppo.fi on 28 Apr 17:08 next collapse

So, lemmy would be illegal under this vision?

an EU-wide approach may be more practical to implement

If you want to do this, do it to yourself. Keep me out of it.

Hapankaali@lemmy.world on 28 Apr 17:14 next collapse

Lemmy would not be illegal. Instead, Lemmy would be required to verify that each account belongs to a real person. Essentially, it’s a way to make bots and astroturfing illegal.

markz@suppo.fi on 28 Apr 17:19 next collapse

I wouldn’t be here if it asked for my id.

Hapankaali@lemmy.world on 28 Apr 17:37 collapse

Me neither, probably. But it’s still a good idea in principle. The spread of malicious misinformation and propaganda has already led to millions of deaths. If we have to give up some anonymous shitposting to curb these excesses, it’s worth it.

Diva@lemmy.ml on 28 Apr 17:45 next collapse

no, its not

chinaski@lemmy.ml on 28 Apr 17:47 next collapse

So youre the type of person who gives up some freedoms in the name of security and comfort.

GalacticSushi@piefed.blahaj.zone on 28 Apr 18:31 next collapse

The spread of malicious misinformation and propaganda has already led to millions of deaths.

Malicious misinformation and propaganda is constantly spread without any sort of anonymity, so I can’t see how this is relevant.

Hapankaali@lemmy.world on 28 Apr 18:37 next collapse

Chemotherapy does not cure all forms of cancer, therefore chemotherapy is not relevant to cancer treatment.

nautilus@lemmy.dbzer0.com on 28 Apr 18:43 next collapse

bro thought he really cooked with this one

markz@suppo.fi on 28 Apr 18:55 next collapse

Home searches would catch some criminals, therefore a blanket search warrant is relevant to stopping crime.

nogooduser@lemmy.world on 29 Apr 07:11 collapse

That’s a little too close to reality for comfort. 😟

We have several governments saying that being able to read some people’s encrypted messages would catch some criminals, therefore we need to be able to read everyone’s encrypted messages.

Martineski@lemmy.dbzer0.com on 29 Apr 10:32 collapse

Literally 2 days ago I was arguing with family about privacy online and I was the only person in car that gave a fuck about it. The 3 other family members were totally ok with being spied on online from start to finish and have this information used against because they had “nothing to hide” and that caring about it would not change anything in their personal lives anyway and that we don’t live in a country that actively cracks down on people against certain things. No example or angle I brought up would change their mind. This was the moment I gave up on those family members in my head. Ugh…

Bloefz@lemmy.world on 29 Apr 03:56 collapse

No but you don’t give everyone chemotherapy just because some people have cancer

non_burglar@lemmy.world on 29 Apr 04:57 collapse

Thank you. I agree with this.

Bloefz@lemmy.world on 29 Apr 03:56 collapse

Exactly, nation states and political parties are the worst in this regard.

Sharkticon@lemmy.zip on 28 Apr 18:32 next collapse

Malicious misinformation gets spread by plenty of elected officials and journalists every day. You don’t have to be anonymous to do that. Hell pretty much the entire US government does it.

PseudoSpock@lemmy.dbzer0.com on 29 Apr 04:48 collapse

No.

EvergreenGuru@lemmy.world on 28 Apr 17:42 next collapse

The whole point of anonymity is that people can say whatever they want publicly without it affecting their real life.

So you can be against whatever war or business practices without the government or your boss bothering you. Now they want to stifle dissent by putting your face to every opinion you have online. They want to card you for being against the war.

Hapankaali@lemmy.world on 28 Apr 17:45 collapse

The proposal isn’t to ban pseudonyms.

Greece isn’t in any war that I am aware of.

EvergreenGuru@lemmy.world on 28 Apr 17:49 next collapse

If it was expanded to the EU, I assume it’d be the Ukraine war. Europe seems to be leaning towards a war with Russia or keeps hinting it might happen.

Bloefz@lemmy.world on 29 Apr 03:57 next collapse

Pseudonyms aren’t anonymous by their very definition.

PseudoSpock@lemmy.dbzer0.com on 29 Apr 04:53 collapse

Since you like the idea so much, you go first. What’s your real name, “friend”? Put your money where your mouth is. Let’s see how safe you feel giving out that information. C’mon, old buddy old pal. What’s the harm, right? Out with it. Triple dog dare ya, bud. We’re waiting. Oh, and until you tell us, maybe can it otherwise.

Hapankaali@lemmy.world on 29 Apr 06:15 collapse

It seems you don’t understand the idea, which wouldn’t be that people would be forced to disclose their identity on social media. Instead, social media would be required to check that users are who they say they are.

Imagine Coca-Cola puts out an ad saying Pepsi instantly makes your balls explode, or that the Daily Mail publishes an op-ed from a Labour insider who is actually an LLM prompted by a GRU operative. It is this type of “free speech” that currently runs rampant on social media, and would be curtailed under this type of proposal.

ms_lane@lemmy.world on 29 Apr 07:23 collapse

Have you messaged the admins of every lemmy instance lemmy.world is federated with to tell them your Name, Date of Birth, Street Address, etc?

If not, why not? That’s what you want for others?

Rothe@piefed.social on 28 Apr 17:37 next collapse

So lemmy would in fact be illegal, because it wouldn’t be lemmy if anonymity wasn’t possible.

Hapankaali@lemmy.world on 28 Apr 18:01 collapse

Anonymity would still be possible, in the same sense that anonymous op-eds in newspapers are possible.

Janx@piefed.social on 28 Apr 18:18 collapse

It’s impossible to verify humanity without verifying identity. Just like all attemps to verify age this will result in vast databases of all our personal data that will be abused, sold, leaked, and hacked.

givesomefucks@lemmy.world on 28 Apr 17:41 collapse

Greece would essentially have to wall themselves off from every country that doesn’t…

So if an instance was hosted in Greece, and this actually happens…

Yeah, it would effect that instance.

It seems like you just quoted a tiny bit of the sentence so it would seem like a possibility tho…

Critics highlight the technical complexity of the issue and suggest that an EU-wide approach may be more practical to implement. Meanwhile, the EU governments which consider such a measure will also need to address potential freedom of speech concerns – as digital rights campaigners have warned for years.

markz@suppo.fi on 28 Apr 18:10 collapse

I quoted it because I have a problem with it and it wasn’t the main thing. Who in their right mind would even suggest this?

givesomefucks@lemmy.world on 28 Apr 19:01 collapse

Because as a complete thought it clearly means:

For X to work we’d have to d Y, which has even less chances of happening.

And you picked out “we’d have to do Y” and presented that like it’s a plan anyone is proposing and not an example of how impossible it would be…

But I don’t think any of that is going to help

perestroika@slrpnk.net on 28 Apr 18:42 next collapse

Welcome to TOR and I2P, ανώνυμοι. Also, you might try wireless mesh networks.

Bloefz@lemmy.world on 29 Apr 04:01 collapse

I’m kinda hoping a more mainstream darknet will appear. Basically like the role VPN providers have now but more .onion like. It’s basically what common people use for stuff that’s slightly at odds with the law but not too terrible. Like pirate bay. Soon adult sites and social media will fall in this category too if you desire anonymity.

Tor and I2P are too dark for the regular person to go to for their social media just because they want anonymity. There’s too much really nasty stuff there. The kind of crime that actually harms real people, not some rich shareholders.

The problem of how to create anonymity even when the law forbids it, while still pushing back against the real crimes is a difficult one.

Basically I want my 2002 internet back but how?

Anivia@feddit.org on 29 Apr 04:58 next collapse

Tor and I2P are too dark for the regular person to go to for their social media just because they want anonymity. There’s too much really nasty stuff there. The kind of crime that actually harms real people, not some rich shareholders.

Uhm, no? You still have to actively search for and visit those sites, you don’t just open tor browser and randomly land on dread

Bloefz@lemmy.world on 29 Apr 05:20 collapse

No but it’s the association that makes you suspicious, gets exit nodes banned and just gives it a bad reputation. That damages more mainstream initiatives because nobody wants to be known as promotor of the silk road and csam network.

mlg@lemmy.world on 29 Apr 06:23 collapse

Tor is the only one that has that type of association because it’s the biggest, so it always gets mentioned in the media.

Most people don’t even know that there are other darknets like i2p.

On top of that, current Tor actually has pretty good latency and connection speeds when not on a bridge. Last time I tried it out, I was getting 80Mbps up/down. Several users here even regularly or exclusively access lemmy with Tor.

I think i2p should actually make an effort to promote higher base bandwidth sharing out of box because it scales easily since its completely decentralized and everyone is a node, unlike Tor. It could easily become more user friendly if nodes weren’t starting off at like 128kbps speeds.

Plus like the other reply mentioned, you have to go out of your way to find the criminal stuff on darknets. Most users would probably be accessing clearnet stuff anyway, and .onion addresses on clearnet sites that have dedicated onion addresses like duckduckgo or some social media platforms.

phoenixz@lemmy.ca on 28 Apr 18:45 next collapse

How, exactly, would they do that?

I’m sure they can force the big ones, like Facebook, but how on earth are you going to force all websites world wide for this?

ms_lane@lemmy.world on 29 Apr 07:24 next collapse

The point is to make places like this illegal, such that we all have to use Facebook and other monitored services.

harmbugler@piefed.social on 29 Apr 11:29 collapse

Also, good luck defining social media.

HubertManne@piefed.social on 28 Apr 18:40 next collapse

again fellow humans. its why I 100% put all my real life information in my profile. its important to lay it all out there and be truthful as sincere beings of earth.

BrightCandle@lemmy.world on 28 Apr 20:56 next collapse

Google, Youtube and Facebook all forced real usernames for a time and it made no difference to the quality of conversation or how toxic it was. Indeed many people on Twitter/X use their real names and say some truly awful things.

Its not about anonymity, the real answer to getting less toxicity is good moderators that care about the subject matter. Its why Reddit is a mixed bag depending on the sub you are in, all depends on the moderators. If you want to fix social medias toxic name calling and everything else you should be forcing Facebook et el to have enough moderators to actually do the job well with interest in the various sub topics.

mimavox@piefed.social on 29 Apr 05:06 collapse

Sounds like this Greek proposal is more about curbing bot accounts though. Every account should be tied to a real person, etc.

Thetechloop@programming.dev on 29 Apr 08:54 collapse

yeah sure

CyroSignal@lemmy.world on 29 Apr 09:06 next collapse

The beginning of mass surveillance…

floquant@lemmy.dbzer0.com on 29 Apr 09:13 collapse

Beginning? Where have you been the last decade? Lol

theacharnian@lemmy.ca on 29 Apr 11:59 collapse

As usual with Greek lawmaking, this is more a tactic to scare people and to use as a sledgehammer when the state wants to, rather than some grand scheme to force the population en masse to de-anonymize themselves. You have got to understand that Greece is undergoing democratic backsliding and was never a very strong rule or law state to begin with. Laws in Greece tend to be super strict but loosely enforced, which basically means the establishment, the police, the courts, can use them to throw the book at whomever they deem too dangerous. The Greek state is structurally incapable of being an actual totalitarian apparatus, but can be an effective authoritarian one when it needs to.