Welcome to week three of my series on using real-world identity to defend ourselves and our rights online. In week one, I reviewed the status quo. Last week, I presented the positive case. This week I make the negative case. Thanks to the many readers who wrote to me with concerns and objections, who helped inform this piece. Again, this is my take, not an attempt to catalog every possible argument.
Beware of geeks bearing gifts
The American legal scholar Thomas Reed Powell famously criticized decisions based on all the bad things that might happen as a “parade of imaginary horribles.” The case for real-world identity online is the opposite. It is a techno-solutionist “parade of wonders” that assumes a host of problems will magically go away if we just reveal our true selves to one and all. This falls apart when you look at reality. We have thirty years of evidence that requiring real-world identities online is harmful.
Identifying people online is how authoritarian regimes punish dissent. Here are three recent examples.
Iran arrests 16 for ‘spreading rumors’ on social media about Israeli strikes (June 14): “The arrests were for ‘disturbing public opinion on the internet, propaganda activities against the system and insulting the high status of martyrs’ through ‘rumor-spreading,’ according to local officials.”
Myanmar’s Digital Crackdown is Worsening (July 17): “A key part of this system is the electronic identification card, or e-ID. The junta maintains that the e-ID is required only for specific purposes, such as applying for a passport or certain types of labor permits. But civil society groups have documented a steady increase in coercion. Workers are being pushed to enroll in the e-ID system or risk losing access to employment, social security benefits, and freedom of movement.”
China cracks down on online content inciting hostility, pessimism (Sep 22). “The announcement came a day after police in Beijing said they had taken ‘compulsory measures’ against three individuals accused of spreading rumours about the death of well-known actor Yu Menglong, 37, who had starred in popular Chinese TV dramas.”
These are not outliers. Data shows that authoritarianism and forced identity tend to go together.
Freedom House’s Freedom on the Net report includes a ranking from 0 (least free) to 4 (most free) on the question “Does the government place restrictions on anonymous communication or encryption?”
The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) Democracy Index classifies countries as a full democracy, flawed democracy, hybrid regime, or authoritarian.
EIU full democracies score an average of 3.2 on the Freedom House question, including 5 of the 7 countries with the best score (4).
EIU authoritarian regimes score an average of 1.74 on the Freedom House question, including 14 of the 15 worst scores (1 or 0).
Companies aren’t safe havens
If you don’t trust your government, maybe private companies can do better. Your phone would be happy to store your government ID in its digital wallet (Apple, Google). And if you’re into visionary startups, Tools For Humanity, co-founded by Sam Altman (CEO of OpenAI), has pioneered World ID, in which an “orb” scans your iris as a proof of unique humanness. All of these companies care deeply about your privacy, so we’re good, right?
Not so fast. Big tech firms have shared over 3 million accounts with US law enforcement in the past ten years, and the pace is accelerating. Apple, for one, also shares devices and financial identifiers. This isn’t unique to the US, either. The European Commission published a roadmap for expanded data-sharing mandates this past June.
Besides, even without government interference, companies get hacked at a staggering rate. The Privacy Rights Clearinghouse has cataloged over 35,000 data breaches since 2005 impacting over 9 billion individuals. Over 40% got access to personal identifiers, and another 39.6% compromised sensitive personal information. Adding even more digital identity online would make breaches that much more damaging, and World ID’s vision of a single, global registry seems like an inevitable catastrophe.
Marginalized communities would be harmed, not helped
Forcing people in marginalized communities to reveal their real-world identity online would destroy safe havens and expose them to harassment and violence. LGBTQ+ adolescents are much more likely to have access to identity-affirming spaces online than in school or at home, but this depends on anonymity – they are also twice as likely to have secondary accounts online, and even so, to report being blackmailed. Women in Saudi Arabia have been murdered for posting on social media. During my time at Jigsaw, I learned that many women who lack rights in such male-guardianship regimes rely on secret second accounts in order to communicate safely.
Real-world identity requirements would also exacerbate inequality. The League of Women Voters objects to voter ID requirements in the US because it would disproportionately impact Latino, Black, Native American, and low-income voters. They also note special challenges for the elderly and people whose names have changed, including married people who take their spouse’s last name. The global digital divide wouldn’t improve either, because as the World Bank notes, 850 million people worldwide don’t have an official ID of any kind, let alone a digital one.
It’s not going to work, anyway
Real-world identity won’t reduce conflict because it won’t change human nature. An epic study by Artur Pericles and Lima Monteiro published by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University found that real-name policies on social media have a very mixed record. Sometimes, real names can actually exacerbate polarization and trigger real-world harassment via doxxing, while anonymous spaces create a safe space for deliberation and civility.
Identity wouldn’t stop fraud, either, because there will still be a huge supply of over 8 billion humans happy to rent out their online identity to scammers on the other side of the planet. This is already happening.
One American woman, Christina Marie Chapman, was last month sentenced to eight-and-a-half years in prison for helping these operatives land jobs at more than 300 companies, generating over $17 million for Kim’s heavily sanctioned regime… other US-based facilitators played a crucial role in the operation – laundering paychecks, stealing identities and running ‘laptop farms’ that allowed North Korean workers to appear as if they were physically present inside the country.
Finally, online restrictions tend to break down quickly. As John Gilmore said over 39 years ago, the Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it. Online age verification is a trendy new government initiative, but the recent UK rollout simply led to skyrocketing use of VPNs, rendering the regulation moot to all but the most ignorant or indigent. If the UK responds by cracking down on VPNs, they’ll be on the path to the authoritarian governments that I discussed at the start of this post. Not a good look.
So, there’s the negative case. That’s not the end of the discussion, though. I’ve presented the farthest two extremes of the debate. There are a world of options and tradeoffs in between that I believe could make the Internet safer than it is today, help us reclaim our rights online, but stop short of requirements that would lead to new harms. I hope to convince you of this starting next week.
If you’re new to Platformocracy, I hope you’ll let me know what you think at [email protected]. And if you find what you’re reading worthwhile, I hope you’ll share it with a friend or colleague. Thanks!
