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?

  • rkunnema@lemmy.zipOPEnglish
    1·
    8 hours ago

    Yeah, I know that instances are run by volunteers. Our prototype instance has EUID as an additional OAuth provider and embeds cryptographic evidence that a poster has a real identity (but not which it is). This information is shared via ActivityPub, even to instances that don’t know what to do with it. The instance can be run by anyone but publishes a policy, e.g., “all users on this instance are pseudonyms of a real identity, real identities cannot appear under different pseudonyms in the same thread, and post at most N per week”. The ID issuer must be trusted by end users who use the modified software to see if the instance adheres to its own policy. End users with the normal software don’t, they just see where the user is from and might trust that instance to uphold its policy, or not care at all.

    I need to think (and read) more about how to validate the behavior of spammers. It is well possible that spammers don’t spam that often, but they might as well create new accounts after some N and operate in parallel with multiple accounts. I think the cap needs to be seen in combination with pseudonyms that are tied to identities.

    Every post is federated to every other instance. My home instance could purge my posts, but all other instances would still have a copy that can’t be deleted by my admins. So the modlog is resilient by virtue of being distributed copies.

    Ah, if your instance is honest. And if it is dishonest, you … switch to a different instance and live with the fact that you lose your “reputation”, i.e., tags at other user’s accounts, post history. Maybe it would be cool to be able to prove that you are the same person?

    If the post was dropped upon submission, then nothing is seen, but thats hardly a silent censorship either, I can immediately see that it wasn’t created.

    I was about to write "but you cannot prove that’, but if I get your drift, you’d just switch and not bother with making this public.

    I dunno, but I think you need a much stronger selling point to get people on board with this, it just seems at odds with reality.

    That’s why I am talking with you guys. ;) Thanks for your input btw. Despite using lemmy for a couple of years now, I’ve never seen the moderation panel … and then my perspective is very protocol-centric, although much about moderation seems to take place out-of-band.

    • mark@programming.devEnglish
      1·
      6 hours ago

      I’ve never seen the moderation panel

      That’s part of your problem. I commend you for putting so much thought into this, but it seems like there’s a lot of areas you’re missing. I would’ve expected a person pushing something like this to have A LOT of experience with the very thing they’re trying to change so drastically.

      I’d say go be an admin or moderator for one of the bigger instances. I’m sure, with more experience, it’ll help better shape your perspective or even change it entirely.