Mitsotakis (The Prime Minister) and his Political Party (New Democracy - the name is probably the irony of the story -) were spying their political opponents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Greek_surveillance_scanda... using Predator Spying software.
He didn't even quit when 57 people tried in a train crash because the collision warning system had never come online. Instead, they immediately sent the fire department to cover up the site of the accident so that nobody would discover the vats of benzoyl that were to be used in fuel adulteration the train was illegally carrying.
How close are we to a third party with sufficient compute being able to mass-de-anonymize social media? What happens if they republish social media feeds with identity probabilities? Do we reach a point where the internet is anonymous to casual users but not to large corporations or governments? Presumably someone is already selling identity-labelling as a service?
Amusingly, (locally generated) LLM text becomes an anonymity mask in those scenarios.
I was thinking about this the other day, using LLM text to thwart stylometric analysis. At some point, I'd read about using machine translations to do the same thing (translating a text to, for example. Chinese then back to English). This seems to only work if the translation method isn't quite perfect so get an "Engrish" effect or the like. But you could probably feed your manifesto or whatever to one of the various modern chatbots and have it rewrite it in the style of Poe or Pynchon or maybe a generic business email. (Obviously, setting aside the issue of if the chatbot is keeping all this stuff in a database somewhere).
I use real name here and posted about pending litigation once. An insurance settlement was offered a week later. Socials are scraped to build profiles for these scenarios. People engaged in fraud tend to blab about it and many business are interested in having such evidence accessible. It can be useful to exploit that system to your advantage when the truth is on your side.
I wonder how they plan to implement that on decentralized social networks such as Nostr. I assume targeting big centralized networks such as X and Facebook is good enough.
The whole point of networks like Nostr is to bypass things like this. Given how they've failed to kill torrents in spite of decades of trying, they probably won't be able to kill decentralized social networks either.
Why is it great that you should be completely deprived of the right to anonymous online communication just because a bunch of people voted on it? Democracy without rights is just mob rule.
with the caveat that I think this should only apply to social media in the strong sense of that term, that is platforms where you present with an identity and that function as public squares, you having any rights is conditional on you being a citizen in the first place.
Given the country in question, if you lived in a Greek polis participating in democratic debate required you to share the same national identity, anonymous-guy#500 from the polis down the street never had any rights to participate. That's not mob rule but the opposite. It's precisely in the mob where anonymity facilitates violence.
When it comes to forcing platforms outside of Greece to comply with this, those platforms will just close their service down to Greece.
If you want to talk about the concept itself of removing anonymity: on HN the impact would not be huge, a lot of us are not really anonymous with links to personal sites in our profiles. Reddit is a different beast entirely.
You don't need a physical presence to be subject to another country's laws. Disobeying a judicial order would be grounds for issuing a warrant which could easily be expanded to an international warrant for the owners of the platform.
The "judicial order" in the first place violates the first amendment, which isn't binding on Greece, but is binding on the nature of any extradition order they wish to seek in the USA.
I do wonder how easy it is to de-anonymise a typical reddit user based on topics, ways of writing, time of writing etc. throw into some form of pattern recognition and see if it links up with other reddit accounts, accounts on forums, things like Facebook etc.
Throw in information Reddit has (ip addresses, user agents etc) and it’s no doubt a certainty.
This will be very interesting to observe. Social media is a cesspool and getting worse by the minute. Even hacker news is being inundated with bots. On controversial topics tons of new accounts appear arguing divisively both sides of the argument.
It’s clear that nefarious regimes have won on social media.
It would be interesting to understand the ratio of real human posts to manipulation on twitter for example - I’d imagine it has long ago tipped to majority bot.
Tackling this problem is existential for western democracies. This seems like a reasonable idea. There might be other options (like validated but anonymous) but we have to try something.
It’s worth noting too that many strong western democracies have laws around hate speech and libel that are being broken by anonymous people online - and the citizens of those countries are perfectly happy with those laws.
One country (Greece) with an ineffective law will have negligible impact on the entire internet. Are there popular Greek-only social medias?
More generally, many people spew toxicity under the real name. And there’s already nothing stopping a social media from only allowing verified users.
Hate speech and libel laws have already been misused against people who didn’t actually “hate” or lie. Even if Western democracies are falling, this could make them fall faster, so IMO we should try better ideas first.
It's incredible how much I can agree with you yet still be revolted beyond measure that I'd have to have my every word online tracked by governments. They are fundamentally untrustable agents, with incredible state powers & a monopoly on force that they regularly abuse. Them demanding access to knowing every word that every person writes is not ok.
If this problem can actually be solved (requirement for both anonymity and ID in different spaces online without AI infiltration), it appears to be a long road to get there...
>It would be interesting to understand the ratio of real human posts to manipulation on twitter for example - I’d imagine it has long ago tipped to majority bot.
The vast majority of bots are government funded. Banning anonymity will just mean people only see bots funded by their own government and its allies, making it even more one-sided (because their own government will almost certainly still have the ability to make bots, like in Chinese internet).
I foresee a lot of people's dead relative's being used to push Russian talking points in the future
Edit: not sure why the downvotes, this will absolutely spur a black market for identities that less than reputable actors will exploit; just like those shady free VPNs that will use your computer as an exit node for their residential proxy network
In the US, AI incarnations of dead kids are used to lobby congress[]. You can resurrect the brutally murdered 10 year old Uzi Garcia, who's hobbies were "football, swimming, and video games" to do his actual secret hobby which is doing the political bidding of other adults and talking to congressman. There is literally a button on the page to let this AI resurrected dead relative to talk to congress.
I don't think we ought to ban anonymity, but I think we should make it a requirement for social networks to display country of origin. Unfortunately that's impossible because of VPNs. Perhaps a system where you're identity is verified by a third party, all documents erased, but leaves you with a permanent token that allows you to authenticate as a citizen of some country.
The upcoming EU digital wallets in theory could do this kind of thing. They're focused on anonymity preserving age verification right now, but exposing any other government-verified attribute anonymously should be equally possible, including residency and/or citizenship if that's your bag.
Most of the facts exposed are likely inferable anyway, or certainly were in a non-GDPR tracking world. I think it'd be clear from my browsing patterns that I'm over 18, and broad tracking + IP checks could quite easily infer where I actually live at least to a national level, I'd be confident that e.g. Meta already know this without being told. Given that, I'm not too worried about exposing residency + over-18 status, the fingerprinting bits are redundant.
Whether it's actually anonymous in practice, and/or whether it starts to go further than that (websites asking for verified gender? First name? City? Full DOB?) will be a real concern but I think there'd be plenty of push back and tech will end up setting norms here through the browser APIs & permissions prompts. In theory in this is all covered under GDPR anyway so requesting or storing information that's not necessary is illegal anyway, and at least explicit requests are less secret than invisible tracking of the same thing - much easier to reject individually, and to litigate abuse collectively.
Mitsotakis (The Prime Minister) and his Political Party (New Democracy - the name is probably the irony of the story -) were spying their political opponents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Greek_surveillance_scanda... using Predator Spying software.
No surprise here
Nobody went to jail - he didn't even quit when the scandal broke. That is Greece in 2026.
There are more ofc:
- https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/apr/06/greek-pm-vows-...
- https://www.euractiv.com/news/top-greek-court-under-fire-aft...
- http://pamfleti.net/english/bota/skandali-me-fondet-e-be-se-...
He didn't even quit when 57 people tried in a train crash because the collision warning system had never come online. Instead, they immediately sent the fire department to cover up the site of the accident so that nobody would discover the vats of benzoyl that were to be used in fuel adulteration the train was illegally carrying.
How close are we to a third party with sufficient compute being able to mass-de-anonymize social media? What happens if they republish social media feeds with identity probabilities? Do we reach a point where the internet is anonymous to casual users but not to large corporations or governments? Presumably someone is already selling identity-labelling as a service?
Amusingly, (locally generated) LLM text becomes an anonymity mask in those scenarios.
I was thinking about this the other day, using LLM text to thwart stylometric analysis. At some point, I'd read about using machine translations to do the same thing (translating a text to, for example. Chinese then back to English). This seems to only work if the translation method isn't quite perfect so get an "Engrish" effect or the like. But you could probably feed your manifesto or whatever to one of the various modern chatbots and have it rewrite it in the style of Poe or Pynchon or maybe a generic business email. (Obviously, setting aside the issue of if the chatbot is keeping all this stuff in a database somewhere).
I use real name here and posted about pending litigation once. An insurance settlement was offered a week later. Socials are scraped to build profiles for these scenarios. People engaged in fraud tend to blab about it and many business are interested in having such evidence accessible. It can be useful to exploit that system to your advantage when the truth is on your side.
Just as close we were 10 years ago.
CIA has always had this privelege.
"Greece does not understand Democracy." - Publius.
I'd say that they should imitate not Lycurgus, but rather Pericles.
Ancient Greece did not have agents crawling peoples stuff for profiling. The argument is broken.
It didn't have bot swarms either.
I think individuals have the right to hide from government bot swarms.
[dead]
I wonder how they plan to implement that on decentralized social networks such as Nostr. I assume targeting big centralized networks such as X and Facebook is good enough.
> I assume targeting big centralized networks such as X and Facebook is good enough.
Exactly, and make non-anon networks the norm enough so that most people will never trust anything said on fringe social networks.
The whole point of networks like Nostr is to bypass things like this. Given how they've failed to kill torrents in spite of decades of trying, they probably won't be able to kill decentralized social networks either.
This sounds great on paper but only if democracy and checks and balances are in order...
Wouldn't accept such a piece of paper even for toilet use. Anonymity strips egos and forces arguments stand on their own merit.
The more government controls, the more checks and balances evolve into paychecks and hidden bank balances.
Government can do a lot of things to you when it controls a lot of things.
And what government is doing is harder to see when it's doing millions of things.
>This sounds great on paper but only if democracy
Why is it great that you should be completely deprived of the right to anonymous online communication just because a bunch of people voted on it? Democracy without rights is just mob rule.
with the caveat that I think this should only apply to social media in the strong sense of that term, that is platforms where you present with an identity and that function as public squares, you having any rights is conditional on you being a citizen in the first place.
Given the country in question, if you lived in a Greek polis participating in democratic debate required you to share the same national identity, anonymous-guy#500 from the polis down the street never had any rights to participate. That's not mob rule but the opposite. It's precisely in the mob where anonymity facilitates violence.
How would this impact platforms like Reddit or HN?
When it comes to forcing platforms outside of Greece to comply with this, those platforms will just close their service down to Greece.
If you want to talk about the concept itself of removing anonymity: on HN the impact would not be huge, a lot of us are not really anonymous with links to personal sites in our profiles. Reddit is a different beast entirely.
Or they'll leave their services open to Greece. They don't have a physical presence there and aren't subject to their laws.
You don't need a physical presence to be subject to another country's laws. Disobeying a judicial order would be grounds for issuing a warrant which could easily be expanded to an international warrant for the owners of the platform.
Don't think that will happen, they will probably tell their ISP's to block access t those sites.
The "judicial order" in the first place violates the first amendment, which isn't binding on Greece, but is binding on the nature of any extradition order they wish to seek in the USA.
Then they will be blocked & only accessible via VPN
[dead]
I do wonder how easy it is to de-anonymise a typical reddit user based on topics, ways of writing, time of writing etc. throw into some form of pattern recognition and see if it links up with other reddit accounts, accounts on forums, things like Facebook etc.
Throw in information Reddit has (ip addresses, user agents etc) and it’s no doubt a certainty.
You would probably get the right person in a list of candidates that would be too long to be useful.
This will be very interesting to observe. Social media is a cesspool and getting worse by the minute. Even hacker news is being inundated with bots. On controversial topics tons of new accounts appear arguing divisively both sides of the argument.
It’s clear that nefarious regimes have won on social media.
It would be interesting to understand the ratio of real human posts to manipulation on twitter for example - I’d imagine it has long ago tipped to majority bot.
Tackling this problem is existential for western democracies. This seems like a reasonable idea. There might be other options (like validated but anonymous) but we have to try something.
It’s worth noting too that many strong western democracies have laws around hate speech and libel that are being broken by anonymous people online - and the citizens of those countries are perfectly happy with those laws.
One country (Greece) with an ineffective law will have negligible impact on the entire internet. Are there popular Greek-only social medias?
More generally, many people spew toxicity under the real name. And there’s already nothing stopping a social media from only allowing verified users.
Hate speech and libel laws have already been misused against people who didn’t actually “hate” or lie. Even if Western democracies are falling, this could make them fall faster, so IMO we should try better ideas first.
It's incredible how much I can agree with you yet still be revolted beyond measure that I'd have to have my every word online tracked by governments. They are fundamentally untrustable agents, with incredible state powers & a monopoly on force that they regularly abuse. Them demanding access to knowing every word that every person writes is not ok.
If this problem can actually be solved (requirement for both anonymity and ID in different spaces online without AI infiltration), it appears to be a long road to get there...
Facebook's real name policy did nothing to stop it being a cesspool. I don't expect that this will have a positive effect on public discourse.
>It would be interesting to understand the ratio of real human posts to manipulation on twitter for example - I’d imagine it has long ago tipped to majority bot.
The vast majority of bots are government funded. Banning anonymity will just mean people only see bots funded by their own government and its allies, making it even more one-sided (because their own government will almost certainly still have the ability to make bots, like in Chinese internet).
Πάντα πρωτοπόροι στη μλκ.
Culturally, is Greece really sensitive? Honest question.
No need to dress it up as think of the children anymore!
I foresee a lot of people's dead relative's being used to push Russian talking points in the future
Edit: not sure why the downvotes, this will absolutely spur a black market for identities that less than reputable actors will exploit; just like those shady free VPNs that will use your computer as an exit node for their residential proxy network
Why not!
In the US, AI incarnations of dead kids are used to lobby congress[]. You can resurrect the brutally murdered 10 year old Uzi Garcia, who's hobbies were "football, swimming, and video games" to do his actual secret hobby which is doing the political bidding of other adults and talking to congressman. There is literally a button on the page to let this AI resurrected dead relative to talk to congress.
[] https://theshotline.org
It's what they would've wanted.
>We can't determine who is talking about those pesky Epstein files and shut them up!
Yeah, it's toxic behavior, I'm sure of it.
I don't think they want people to discuss anything like the Panama Papers again, ever
I don't think we ought to ban anonymity, but I think we should make it a requirement for social networks to display country of origin. Unfortunately that's impossible because of VPNs. Perhaps a system where you're identity is verified by a third party, all documents erased, but leaves you with a permanent token that allows you to authenticate as a citizen of some country.
The upcoming EU digital wallets in theory could do this kind of thing. They're focused on anonymity preserving age verification right now, but exposing any other government-verified attribute anonymously should be equally possible, including residency and/or citizenship if that's your bag.
I'm extremely mixed on it, overall I expect incredibly over-demanding asks from websites, but Digital Credential API likewise allows for various scoped requests/disclosures. https://developer.chrome.com/blog/digital-credentials-api-sh...
Most of the facts exposed are likely inferable anyway, or certainly were in a non-GDPR tracking world. I think it'd be clear from my browsing patterns that I'm over 18, and broad tracking + IP checks could quite easily infer where I actually live at least to a national level, I'd be confident that e.g. Meta already know this without being told. Given that, I'm not too worried about exposing residency + over-18 status, the fingerprinting bits are redundant.
Whether it's actually anonymous in practice, and/or whether it starts to go further than that (websites asking for verified gender? First name? City? Full DOB?) will be a real concern but I think there'd be plenty of push back and tech will end up setting norms here through the browser APIs & permissions prompts. In theory in this is all covered under GDPR anyway so requesting or storing information that's not necessary is illegal anyway, and at least explicit requests are less secret than invisible tracking of the same thing - much easier to reject individually, and to litigate abuse collectively.