This is a bit of thoughts about Elena Rossini article and Aral Balkan explanation of these strange decision by EU commission to move to W Social instead of Eurosky project.
Reblog via Aral Balkan
“My fear is that W Social is just another for-profit Big Tech startup that happens to be based in the EU. We don’t need that. We don’t need more European surveillance capitalists and people farmers. We need ethical alternatives working for the common good.”
– Yours truly, in @_elena’s excellent expose on W Social.
Do read the article to the end, especially noting the bit about the composition of their board of advisors, which includes an ex-Google AI lead and an ex-Paypal Chief [Violate Your] Privacy Officer who now works at Tools for Humanity (Sam Altman’s “Sci-fi dystopia? Hold my beer…” identity farming startup that wants to scan your eyeballs).
#WSocial #EuropeWashing #PrivacyWashing #BigTech #peopleFarming #surveillance #capitalism #EU #ATProto #fediverse
Enough of quotes and references. Here is my own bit.
I find this EU commission is very concerning. It looks a bit illogical at first. Like turning 180 degrees, compared to starting a fediverse server, for example.
Automation of propaganda via so called “AI” become the “9/11 of the internet” – an event that eroded trust and made life more difficult for everyone via stricted security checks everywhere – from bank account open procedures to security checks at airport. I see same thing here. Trust between people is being eroded and everything looks suspicious, especially everything or everyone new. “Is this an AI slop?” is what first comes to mind to many people so often these days. So I guess this is how W social sold the carrot to the donkey of EU politics. They promised that every account there is a human. The EU commission puts very strong attention into verification there. It claimed to do so for sake of children safety, but may be real goal of de-anonymization of the internet is a bit different – to expose AI bots and automated propaganda agents because they can’t provide an ID document, pass a selfie check or give a real payment details. There are experiments already when at least some of these checks passed more or less automatically. But so far I don’t know yet about the widespread use of things like that.
So here we are again. For sake of filtering bots out as they used to spread disinfo and pro-dictatorship propaganda en masse in automatic way, EU ready to impose age checks and identity collection over everyone. Eroded trust for sake of security. This is not just a some evil conspiracy – this is a result of social experiment abusing second time the same traits of state-based governance. For sake of security it always prefers centralized, “well defined and well controlled” solution like id data collection and deanonymization of the internet over less centralized and “vague” solution as to improve society immunity against disinformation, especially regarding elections. Such measures assume improving immunity of every single person to disinformation, at individual level. Becoming own feed self-moderator. “But this is so hard to do!”, said politicians and did what they do best or what they taught to do: introduced more rules, checks and complicated compliance procedures everyone will have to obey now, like a criminal whose guilt has been proven in court.
Internet will be deanonymized. it will become less usable for organizing and activism. People will seek VPNs at first, but later they will be outlawed or adapt (by embedding age checks into them, by need to perform age check to be able to use them). People will return to the roots, and will have to turn their eyes and ears to their local communities they live in. Some people in marginalized groups can be unlucky as in case of real danger they can end up in situation where there is nowhere to go, nobody to scream “HELP!!!!” to. The single thing we can hope on that some informal decentralized mutual-aid networks would be created and being underground they still be reachable for those who need the help.
Whistleblowers, investigative bloggers and other activists exposing crimes committed with use of state resources and via state apparatus actually will end up in an absurd context when they can’t use safely internet to spread their investigations and findings.
Most of the time I read about that coming de-anomization of the internet, everyone speaking about collecting identity data from people who visit social media and other websites via dedicated “third-party” service.
But eventually the goal to eliminate bots away from the internet will end up with need to do identity-collection over people who own website names, who rent ip addresses, compute, storage, and bandwidth for websites to work. So it will end up being much more widespread thing, not regarding social media and other “stuffed with people” websites.
Regarding elections, I still not sure whether deanonymization of internet will keep automated disinfo agents at bay. Lets see for how long W Social and “verified internet” will stay untouched from automated agents invasion.
