Hi! I am a researcher at the CISPA-Helmholtz-Institute for information security (https://cispa.de/en/people/kuennemann). I would like to get some community feedback on a project we are working on. I am a Lemmy-user myself, but of course I use my other account for lurking; this account is for my research business.
My question taps into the age-verification debate, which I know is very controversial, and people are sceptical for very good reasons; I just ask everyone to stay polite and engage the topic.
In short, I am worried about the effect bots have on public discourse, which to a large part takes place in the Internet. I would like to propose cryptographic methods that allow an instance to attest that a poster or commenter are a real human being. I think the European Unified ID (euid.eu) provides good infrastructure to do that, at the cost of relying on the member countries to provide them with an ID. Crypto-magic can (potentially - I haven’t worked out the details yet) ensure that:
- users from an instance that opted in are sure to belong to someone with an id, other instances may use this knowledge in their moderation tools
- users from that instance can retain several pseudonyms that even this instance cannot link. Yet (configurable) policy can ensure that no users uses two pseudonyms in the same thread
- we could cap how many posts or comments a user makes per day/week/month, across their pseudonyms
- users who post on this instance but are not displayed (in the web or to other instances) can provide evidence that they are being censored, which the public may review to discredit that instance and chose a new one.
- the infrastructure also happens to allow for age verification (EUID can attest to statements like “this anonymous person is > 18”), and it could be part of an instance’s policy. Thanks to lemmy’s federated infrastructure, multiple verifying instances with different policies can exist. It’s not a focus of mine, though – I think social networks should not exploit children or adults.
Some of these ideas we have worked out (and tested on) reddit in this article, which was before Lemmy became popular and EUID was on the horizon.
I am interested in practical advice about who to talk to about engineering and how to best involve the community – we’ve got a prototype fork of lemmy including end-user verifiable authentication. I am also interested in how the community feels about the burden of moderation and this as a potential remedy. When discussing age verification, some users say they will never accept any ID-based authentication. Are there some amongst those who would change their minds provided they had full pseudonymity and censorship could be detected and made public with cryptographically signed evidence?
The difference to reddit would be that in a federated network, this could be decided on a per-instance basis. I assume this is not mainly a convenience problem for you, is it? But more distrust towards Reddit (and what they would do with your data) or the ID issuer (and if they would use this to lock out dissent)?
For the record, I am starting from the premise “we need to limit the amount of astro turfing” because it distorts political discourse. There’s also other ways to recognize bots, but they are not very reliable. The goal is that the issuer does not learn what you do in lemmy and that lemmy (including that magic instance) does not learn who you are. Would it be a bigger problem for you that such a complicated system could be flawed, or that the issuers gets too much power over who can speak (or something else entirely)?
The issue is that I and most other people are not technical enough to audit such a system and be satisfied that identifying info was not retained or intercepted, or the code furtively changed or disguised etc. etc. If what you’re suggesting can be done, that’s neat, but it makes no difference to me because I cannot know when it is and isn’t being applied or if it’s being comprehensively applied, and I will go on assuming that if I show my ID, it is leaked or intercepted instantly. And knowing I have shown my ID would distort my political discourse for sure.
If some people are not certain whether I’m an astroturf, that’s a tradeoff I can live with.