Verification will very quickly become an issue on Fedi, I believe.
Even now, we have multiple “Linus Torvalds” accounts.
Some have thousands of followers and a few posts, but do we know if any of them are actually him? Including the newest one on .social…?
Obviously Linus should know how to paste a link into a website he owns for verification.
However, if normal users can’t do it, it’s not good enough. What happens when/if celebrities start signing up? They’re not gonna be linking to a website they own for verification.
#Fedi #Fediverse #Mastodon
@[email protected] the issue is, misinformation. If nobody can verify who is who. Then anyone can say anything and it wouldn’t mean anything.
Celebrities saying things on social media, frequently ends up in the news/tabloids. These things need to be verifiable.
That’s the tabloid’s problem then, and who believes shit in tabloids anyway?
“Pregnant Man Gives birth, that’s news, it’s in the Weekly World News”
Frankly I don’t give two shits whether it’s the person they claim to be…i don’t even look at usernames most of the time. I care even less about what some public figure, especially an actor, says.
If a figurehead decides to be active on any social media, I don’t pay attention to that garbage, because that’s what it is.
I absolutely agree that misinformation (and disinformation) is a problem. However, I do not think that it is something with a good software solution at this time. The traditional/corporate social media effectively implemented a non-solution to the problem and declared it solved. Not to mention, verification of identity is an issue that governments also struggle with, relying on substantial amounts of good faith.
There ARE means of tying a software identity to a verifiable and hard to counterfeit computing object. For example, a local cryptographic key pair or a hardware security module. However, without involvement of a trusted third-party, it is not currently possible to tie this computing object to a specific human being.
My thinking is that attempting to implement an identity verification component in the Fediverse, therefore, is likely a misallocation of effort that could be better spent fixing bugs, extending features, and improving stability and interoperability. There is a lot still to do in virtually every project that I’ve peeked at, whether it’s mod tools, IaC, or just plain code cleanup. I think that at this juncture, what is required is more on the social side of things, ensuring that people are aware that one cannot believe everything that they see on the Internet or the identity claims of those that they interact with, unless they undertake further verification themselves. This is what was done in pre-social media forums and BBS systems with a good degree of effectiveness.
Don’t get me wrong, I would be ecstatic to be proven incorrect but would much prefer that identity verification be shelved until such a time as crytographers are able to solve it with their dark mathematical arts than for any Fediverse project to waste time from people’s lives trying to implement a similar non-solution.