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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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).
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, it's toxic behavior, I'm sure of it.
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.
Throw in information Reddit has (ip addresses, user agents etc) and it’s no doubt a certainty.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Exactly, and make non-anon networks the norm enough so that most people will never trust anything said on fringe social networks.
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.
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).
Having external actors take control of your democracy is the nightmare scenario - which Ancient Greeks had first hand experience of.
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.
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.
Amusingly, (locally generated) LLM text becomes an anonymity mask in those scenarios.
CIA has always had this privelege.
And http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755016
Also http://github.com/antirez/hnstyle
Glhf
No surprise here
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-...
In a corrupt government, as they are almost all globally, the less state the better.
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.
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.