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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   12451 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 15, 2026

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I would be more motivated to fight against this if bot-infestation was not such a massive issue on social media.

You think digital ID will actually help to solve the issue? I don't really see how that would happen.

If every user is tied to a real-person ID, then that would be true for bots as well. Since there is a finite amount of ID's, it would be impossible to just spin up a new bot once one gets banned; At some point you run out of ID's to use.

Platforms will require europeans to do id verification where legally required, meanwhile bots based overseas will be unaffected.

That, I suppose, is an issue I did not consider.

I don't see much point if age verification is only implemented on a country by country basis. That way we still get the foreign interference and inflammatory trolls that just spin up a new account. The worst of both worlds really.

Although if the argument for it is mainly "we need to protect the children against Andrew Tate", then I could maybe see European governments doing it this way regardless.

The push for ID verification does seem to be happening in every western country at basically the same time though. So if it does go through, I have some hope that it will at least be a global thing.

At the cost of the chilling effect of the government being able to correlate your posts better. Mind you they already can probably for the vast majority of unsophisticated users so who knows, maybe it doesn't matter.

Sure, I agree that the surveillance aspect is a major point against ID verification, but the poster I responded to was asking how this would help combat bots.

Why do you think they'll snip bots though? They're pretty useful to the establishment.

Last I checked, most moderators were volunteers. Even Reddit, huge as it is, is still largely community driven. If a moderation team has an anti-bot stance, then I would expect the place run by that team to contain significantly less bots once ID-bans become available.

So you think the digital ID will be public for all to see, so volunteer moderators will be able to make decisions like thar? I doubt it, such a solution would cause massive chaos.

Moderators don't need to see the ID to ban it. Only the website does. Assuming ID is mandatory, then the website would have to be able to see it in order to verify the user is old enough. The moderators would send a request for the website to ban the ID of the user. The rest is automated.

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