The reposts and expressions of shock from public figures followed quickly after a user on the social platform X who uses a pseudonym claimed that a government website had revealed “skyrocketing” rates of voters registering without a photo ID in three states this year — two of them crucial to the presidential contest.
“Extremely concerning,” X owner Elon Musk replied twice to the post this past week.
“Are migrants registering to vote using SSN?” Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, an ally of former President Donald Trump, asked on Instagram, using the acronym for Social Security number.
Trump himself posted to his own social platform within hours to ask, “Who are all those voters registering without a Photo ID in Texas, Pennsylvania, and Arizona??? What is going on???”
…
Yet by the time they tried to correct the record, the false claim had spread widely. In three days, the pseudonymous user’s claim amassed more than 63 million views on X, according to the platform’s metrics. A thorough explanation from Richer attracted a fraction of that, reaching 2.4 million users.
The incident sheds light on how social media accounts that shield the identities of the people or groups behind them through clever slogans and cartoon avatars have come to dominate right-wing political discussion online even as they spread false information.
It makes sense. What’s the first thing you’re going to do when you arrive in a foreign country, when you have no money, don’t speak the language, don’t know what you’re going to do tomorrow, have been through hell after literally walking thousands of kilometres?
Register for voting in the local presidential election of course! You still have your napkin that your communist contact gave you with a quick scribble: “Beeden, good; Troomp, no good”.
Unpopular opinion: if you want to save the internet, no more anonymity. One person, one identity online
I pirate too much stuff because monthly fees and everything as a service are eating everyone alive. Hard pass.
You will get LGBTQ people killed by forcing them to use their real identities online.
This take isn’t unpopular, it’s terrible
The Internet was just fine before all the normies got here. I suggest that we make the Internet difficult to use again to trim some fat.
I get what you’re saying, and why, but it’s a really bad idea. Force people to use their real identities online and you’ll end up with people no longer talking or they’ll be killed.
Also, this single identity is impossible to implement on the technical level. It’s too easy to cheat with that,.
or they’ll be killed.
I feel like this risk is drastically overblown. Every LGBTQ person isn’t going to be hunted down by some deranged lunatic just for speaking their mind.
If you’re in Afghanistan dealing with the Taliban, fine I’ll buy that you need anonymity. However, for those of us average folks in a western country that still has reasonable laws on the books… I don’t see it happening.
Most people are already trivially doxable. If you really wanted to, I’m sure you could figure out how to come to my residence and harm me if you were sufficiently motivated (please don’t, that would be a major downer).
I’ve had plenty of arguments on the Internet, thus far that hasn’t happened. Most people just want to live their life…
This also goes the other way too, the nastiest people/the ones making repeated threats could be more quickly identified/stopped from making those threats, creating swarms of harassment accounts, cheaters could be stopped in games because a ban would be a “no you are really truly banned for X number of years” (and those of us that enjoy multiplayer video games could stop having to install ever more invasive software on our computers).
I think there’s a time and place for anonymity; anonymity has certainly allowed history to be changed for the better in the past, but I don’t think it should be the default (it never has been until very recent history)… and I’m very concerned that anonymity could end up changing history for worse (and already has).
Trump may never have been elected if the broader public wasn’t flooded with anonymous “supporters” in 2016 and those of us arguing for Clinton ended up wasting time arguing with bots.
Also, this single identity is impossible to implement on the technical level. It’s too easy to cheat with that.
No idea what you mean by this. It’s pretty easy to have a single identity and/or government verifiable identity system.
Telling people they are over reacting to death threats is a take…
It is “easy” to have a single Identity system, but that doesn’t address the criticism of it being difficult to secure. But either way, it seems Florida has volunteered for this experiment with the age restriction for social media.
Telling people they are over reacting to death threats is a take…
That’s a gross oversimplification of my comment, by a brand new account too, very cool.
It’s a charitable simplification too. I’m not the one that emphasized that not every LGBTQ person is going to be hunted.
Because it’s absurd to say that nobody would be harmed; speaking in absolutes is the antithetical of intelligent discussion for complex issues.
How many LGBTQ people were killed because Trump and all the faux Trump supporting accounts weren’t stopped in 2016? How many more will be killed if this problem of bot accounts, nation state actors, and people making threats with 0 accountability isn’t solved and disinformation and extremism spreads further?
Never underestimate the need for privacy in this world. In WWII local resistance cells would blow up government registration offices so that the Nazis wouldn’t know who is Jew and who is not. If you’re read that Republicans 2025 document, you’d be worried too about the government knowing if you are gay had an abortion or whatnot.
Then, a single government verifiable Identity system. Great! So WHICH government is going todo this? The US government? For all citizens world wide? How would that work, exactly?
Will I only be able to talk with people in my country now to be able to force this? And who will make all sites to use this? What if I have a website hosted in a non participating country? Block that site? Are we going to block millions of sites now?
It’s not doable on a practical level because it would only work with a single world government, and even then it’s easy to cheat with. If I’m the main administrator for the website, I could simply make a post with your name saying that you want to kill the president. Since it’s your name, you go to jail now, somehow? So okay, do we then only allow big sites with paid admins that sign NDA’s and contracts that they will not cheat? Are we only going to push bigger sites to do this?
This is not a practical solution.
You raise a lot of questions, but a bombardment of questions doesn’t mean there aren’t good answers to those questions.
You cite the Nazis, but you might be surprised to learn post-war Germany to this day has harsh laws in this area https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/germanys-laws-antisemitic-hate-speech-nazi-propaganda-holocaust-denial/
There’s something to be said for protecting people that need protecting, but there’s also something to be said for holding propaganda spewing nut jobs accountable and limiting their reach.
Never underestimate the need for privacy in this world.
Also please do not confuse privacy with anonymity. It stops being about your privacy the second you start speaking publicly. Maybe you need privacy to maintain anonymity while doing so, but attacking unfettered anonymity is not an inherent attack on privacy.
Then, a single government verifiable Identity system. Great! So WHICH government is going todo this? The US government? For all citizens world wide? How would that work, exactly?
One idea that’s rather simple would be to allow users to show a verified status that’s backed by their own government but doesn’t actually expose their identity (just that yes, this is a person from e.g. the United States and this is their government linked account). Users could then choose to filter out folks that aren’t verified or aren’t part of their own country.
For a federated system you could federate a token around that can be checked against government services either client side or server side, periodically.
Since it’s your name, you go to jail now, somehow?
Someone stealing someone else’s identity is already a serious crime. In the US at least, you’re guaranteed a trial and even then this would surely be exceptionally fringe. You could also further protect against this by requiring post to be cryptographically signed, but this is getting to an extreme level of conspiracy.
The fact of the matter is, right now a single person from a foreign country can represent an unlimited number of accounts that are indistinguishable from the account of a person across town. You have no way of knowing whether you’re even talking to someone that has residency let alone the right to vote in your country.
That is not healthy political discourse.
“People acting like people in spaces where people gather. More on this breaking story at 11.”
But illegally, though
AnonymousForeignFTFY
Chinese, North Korean, and Russian shills.
Specified for you.
And they’re doing it because they think it is funny
I truly am curious on why you think someone is spreading this amount of misinformation as a joke. Usually I see explanations such as:
- Russia and China are perpetrators of most of the misinformation
- Conservatives spreading misinformation (that they do believe) in order to make their conclusions more plausible (see Charlie Kirk)
I know trolls exist but could they really be this influential? I would hope not.
It’s been a staple rhetorical strategy for fascists to both be entirely serious and “totally joking” with the same exact statements. It allows them to consistently push the boundaries of acceptable prejudice while always having a fall-back. “You took that seriously!?!?”.
Like the recent Rudy Guiliani’s joke about New York (a place he ran) being a communist state. That seems to add up.
Asimov: *nails it*
There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.
The bad guys since high school and in countless tales and yet still in governments and corner suites and at pulpits: *weaponizes it*
You know who you are: *treats it all like team sports* *thinks is player* *is ball*
I think this is a great comment and I extend the same thinking to the bullshit/ magical thinking people engage in around science/ medicine denial-ism, new age mysticism, and conspiratorial thinking/ I’d rather believe a good story modes of thinking.
100% its a part of our political system, but as Asimov states, its in our cultural life as well, and I have no patience for it. I call it out when I see it and if that makes me the ass hole, so be it. Its a burden I’ll bear to have conversations grounded in reality or not at all.
X did not respond to a request for comment, which was met with an automated reply.
I’m pretty sure that automated reply was just 💩, since that’s what he does with all of his other companies.
Has anyone considered that these “anonymous” or “foreign” operators are just sophisticated bots?
Many of them probably are, but they are bots designed to spread that information…
This is a perfect example of truthful mainstream propaganda.
I have no doubt all of the facts in this piece are correct, but they’re also aligned in such a way to suggest to the reader that the real root of the problem is that commoners are allowed to have anonymous social media accounts not tied to a real name or some government ID program.
There is not some conspiracy here where media companies are colluding with God knows who to covertly and subtly spread the idea that anonymity online is bad.
It’s more likely that you don’t want that to be true, but recognize that at least on some level it is true, and this is how you’re grappling with that cognitive dissonance.
This doesn’t show there is some conspiracy, it shows that there could be one. Maybe I should not be so forceful in my dissent, and I should say there is a potential the conspiracy is happening, but neither you nor the other poster has actually offered up any evidence of such a conspiracy. A conspiracy is always just a good way to dismiss things we don’t want to admit are true or might be true.
You keep saying conspiracy because it’s easy to discount that label, a label that I never used.
I wasn’t describing a plot by some old men in a smoke filled room, I was pointing out an example of propaganda used to manufacture consent.
Unfortunately, the culprit is the system, working as designed. That’s an exponentially more dangerous villain then any cabal could ever be.
You keep saying conspiracy because it’s easy to discount that label, a label that I never used.
Because even without outright saying, it’s clearly implied. And, besides, you’ve still provided zero evidence to support the assertion. You are doing what you are accusing me of doing: using a label to assert (or in my case, dismiss) something without evidence.
I keep running into people who say moderation is impossible at scale.
It does not make surface level sense to me. But it’s true. Ban evasion is too easy. With no repercussions behavior is not socially enforced.
If you think through it, and do want moderation and bans to work, it always comes back to having to have an authoritative index of all users. And that gets dystopian almost instantly. It always needs some organization or government to tell the platform that a user is who they say they are.
What about networks of trust instead of a single index?
That sounds interesting. I’d be curious to learn if:
- It’s been proven to scale to millions of users.
- If there are usually strong repercussions for lying.
You and I both! Unfortunately I am familiar with the concept but unfamiliar with any specific details.
Moderation at scale, like democracy, only works with an educated user base. When your user base is too dumb to help self-police, shit gets very difficult.
So people don’t deserve, or can’t be trusted enough, to be allowed the right to have anonymous online accounts? Everything needs be tied to a centralized/government ID system because the average person is too stupid?
Not what I said. But you are proving my point.
Not what I said. But you are proving my point.
The fact that you can’t see the irony in your own response, is more evidence for your point than anything else.
Regardless, I don’t think that should deprive you of the right to anonymity.
Cool story bro. Still not what I said.
This.
The real way to deal with this issue is immedate fact checking of information.
The article, however, suggests that the way to deal with the issue is forcing people to use their real identities on line, which will only serve to silence speech. How many of these right wing psychopaths will happily threaten to murder you if you argue they’re wrong?
The answer to bad speech is more speech, not suppression.
Fact checking the firehose of falsehoods? That’s never going to work.
We should teach how to be critical of information.
It also doesn’t distinguish between anonymous and pseudonemous, which is important.
“Users”
See: the people still pushing DNC conspiracy theories almost a decade later.
The right is so desperate to be upset that they will believe anything except reality.
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Unfortunately it’s not only the right. A lot of people from all walks of life are jumping on misleading articles because they aling with their views and don’t bother fact checking them. You see it plenty on Lemmy.
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Some of these are clearly wedge-driving divisive trolls posing as leftists. Especially those touting voting 3rd party or not voting.
This is absolutely rampant on .ml and it drives me nuts that their predilections for stupid campism causes them to not just allow, but actively protect right wing trolls.
Exact same arguments are made to minimise right wing extremists, “has to be a left wing false flag”.
Both are possible. The enemy is extremism, regardless of leaning.
You can’t really divide right wingers. They fall in line, because they are close minded. The left’s tent is much bigger and thus much easier to divide.
And the left doesn’t hate itself.
Some of these are clearly wedge-driving divisive (sic) trolls posing as moderates. Especially those hectoring voters that vote with their conscience now that attitudes toward a current genocide is making it impossible to vote for either of the frontrunners.
- What’s funny is I’m not even a moderate
- I’ve just done the comparative analysis in knowing that (a) the election outcome is inevitable where 1 of these 2 candidates will be in office whether you vote or not, and (b) one would commit MORE genocide than the other guy.
- You thus can still vote your conscience.
Let me crystal clear. I do not think that your position or attitude are moderate either. Haranguing people to vote against their conscience is a bad look. Big genocide, small genocide, both are genocide. If that overloads some people’s ‘election calculus’ it’s a reasonable and engaged reaction. If anything talking down to them is more likely to turn them off voting at all.
Normally I’d agree to each their own but I truly cannot grasp how anyone can come to the conclusion that when the two options are inevitable, they would choose more genocide over less genocide. It quite literally means less people dying. It’s the only logical and ethical choice.
Voting for big genocide or voting for small genocide is irreconcilably voting for genocide for some people. It’s a morally cognizant choice for some to not want to put the endorsement of their vote on either.
I’ll never not believe that is logically and ethically-flawed thinking, sorry. A vote doesn’t mean “I Endorse Genocide,” it just means, “I am doing the thing between two inevitable choices whether I vote or not that will help Palestinians, Ukrainians, and women’s rights more than the other option.”
If merely one less child dies, then it is clearly worth it to vote — right?
It is ‘rational’ attitudes such as this that MLK bemoaned in his Birmingham jail letters. Order above justice. An order in which the boot is not on your neck. So you minimize its dehumanizing brutality in relation to the maintenance of the day-to-day comforts you enjoy.
Hypothetically: if Biden was sending weapons and financial support to Russia in support of their war efforts but mildly denouncing Putin when pressed; and Trump was pledging full throated support of Putin and offering to nuke Kyiv; would you still feel so enthusiastic about voting for Biden or for your moral calculus? Might you lament the electoral system that has put this decision before you. Might you protest this mockery of democratic choice. Even if you internally still cede to moral calculus, might you continue to make your displeasure known and apply whatever pressure was within your purview as a voter to make. Might you be offended by people demanding you not only vote for Biden regardless your rightful concerns about Putin and the sovereignity of Ukrainians but also try to insinuate that you are part of some foreign operation to undermine the election for voicing your concerns?
You thus can still vote your conscience
Not if my conscious isn’t ok with voting for a genocide-doer at all
Then you risk letting the person who will commit genocide even more.
How is more genocide better than less genocide for your conscience?
Then you risk letting the person who will commit genocide even more.
Wrong, as I don’t live in a swing state. You know, like the majority of Americans?
I can safely not vote for either knowing that my state isn’t going to go to Trump. I even personally know 2 people who voted Trump last election who are going third party this time around, so I’m DOUBLE-covrred.
I just love seeing people online automatically assume people are in swing states (or that the EC doesn’t exist) and try to guilt trip people. It’s hilarious
Wait, was it your conscience or is it because you don’t live in a swing-state…? Because you dodged the question:
How is more genocide better than less genocide for your conscience?
If you live in a firmly blue state that will vote for Biden, then sure your entire point is moot. But just like how red states have turned blue or at least purple (Arizona), blue or swing-states can turn red (e.g., Ohio). So it might be worth voting just to ensure that trend continues.
Because Republicans love this messaging you’re now promoting; for it only weakens blue state strongholds as you expect other voters to do the work for you.
Can’t read, or unfamiliar with how US elections work?
Because I don’t live in a swing state my lack of voting for Biden does not support Trump
So my vote is for no genocide but my state will force it to become some genocide through the EC
If you want to pretend like a Californian not voting Biden is somehow giving the election to Trump: that’s a you problem and I find it hilarious
But Republicans love this messaging
And? Maybe the Dems shouldn’t put forth garbage options then. don’t blame voters for the DNCs inability to do basic shit to win elections.
Found one
Y’all reuse the same tactics too: when accused of something, copy/paste it but change a couple of words around. EPIC WIN!!
It’s boring, do something different.
You know electoral system is truely garbage when voting for 3rd party is considered “bad”. Not a lot of freedum going on in the US.
Additionally have you also considered some people dont agree with your political view, so not everything has to be a conspiracy
Yep I do agree it’s bullshit. The FPTP combined with Electoral College has utterly fucked our country. I really wish we could vote for independents or 3rd party and not totally fuck everything. Unfortunately that won’t happen until changes most probably comes through Democrats as it has historically worth most other issues.
To your second point, don’t know, it just seems extremely self-defeating to the point that one has to wonder…
I think the cult of ignorance is just as prevalent across all political ideologies the left is not better than the right is no better than etc etc. Its all just idiots arguing with idiots about things they don’t know or are purposefully ignorant of.
Nope. The both sides argument is horse shit. GOP voters are less educated by a wide margin. Try again buddy.
Not true in 2014, but maybe things have changed in the last 10 years.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160289614001081
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Individuals who identify as Republican have greater probability knowledge
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Individuals who identify as Republican have higher verbal reasoning ability
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Individuals who identify as Republican have better question comprehension
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Cognitive ability’s effect on party identity works through socio-economic position
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This. This right here, people, is why the community rules exist and why I’m happy to see them consistently enforced.
