“The technology that was intended to free us has become the tool of our own oppression,” he said during a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “The social media that was supposed to bring unity, clarity and democracy have instead given us division, vice and a reactionary agenda.”
“The technology that was intended to free us has become the tool of our own oppression,” he said during a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “The social media that was supposed to bring unity, clarity and democracy have instead given us division, vice and a reactionary agenda.”
This is very telling.
The technology was never intended to free “us”, it was intended to make money.
Facebook was literally invented as a tool to bring misogyny to uni students, not unity nor democracy to anyone.
And from the very second they realised they could, those who own social media platforms literally jumped at the opportunity to sow division and influence politics, again, for money (and the power that comes with it, and with essentially being a mouthpiece for fascism).
Honestly, it’s getting really fucking old seeing all these people in positions of power try to oppose these latest developments but only being able to muster the most superficial of criticisms and while flat out refuse to acknowledge, never mind address, the long standing underlying systems that enabled them (or for how long, this isn’t new, before social media it was, and still is regular main stream billionaire owned media), and that will continue to enable them even if the current dictators running amuck are stopped. Because these people in the positions of power need those very same systems to maintain their own power, and will never fully commit to oppose them, which is what those of “us” they’re acting like saviours to, actually need.
Great points, but then suddenly:
Among other measures he proposed fighting bots and fake profiles by requiring that users digitally identify themselves
Oh no
Yup. Just a push for more censorship and spying.
If they actually wanted to do anything about tech billionaires, they’d sanction them.
Well, in the US we’ve never had a good way to identify individuals. This could be a good tool for any government need that requires an ID. And once it’s standard here, well, might as well use the same over there. It’s a standard, after all.
I’d be very supportive of a public, public key infrastructure and Identity Provider.
They should eventually be necessary for some things…like any official government or online banking business. Essentially anywhere you would expect something to be notarized or witnessed.
But they should be optionally allowed on other services. I wouldn’t accept requiring an official government ID to shitpost on Reddit, but if I were a celebrity and I could use it to officially verify myself on Mastodon, or even Facebook? Sure.
People misunderstand what client certificates are and what they do. They are a pair of keys, private and public. You use the private key to digitally sign (and/or encrypt) a message. The public key (client certificate) is issued by a third-party entity that all involved parties trust (the certificate authority), as proof that it has received a message signed by the same private key in the past.
By storing the private keys on something portable but non-exportable, like a smartcard, they are the “something you have” in multifactor authentication. And by virtue of needing to be protected by a password/pin/passphrase, proof of “something you know”.
It’s the digital equivalent of a state issued ID or driver’s license, and personally I think it’s absurd we don’t have it by now. You technically don’t “need” a state-issued ID to do anything, but they also certainly make modern life a hell of a lot easier.
It’s the digital equivalent of a state issued ID or driver’s license
Exactly. And it’ll be run by X, The Everything Platform.
Something similar already exists. I mean, there’s nothing stopping you from buying a certificate from Digicert or GoDaddy or whatever and sign your emails with it, but you can’t exactly use it to sign on to your bank or IRS.gov.
DoD PKI has the ECA program, though, and it is a requirement to authenticate to a lot of DoD resources.
And yet, most EU politicians are still sound asleep while continuing to post on X as if nothing happened. And most EU newspaper’s favourite sentence is still "… as <insert_name> wrote on X earlier“ and embedding the message directly from X.
These people fail to recognize the danger until someone literally holds a gun to their head.
The eu has sent a warning to twitter, I don’t know if this has been followed up or not.
A (very) large international news labour union organisation has pulled out of twitter, I think that totalled about 150 news outlets
Yep. Centralizing all that power in their hands is great for allowing them to control the narrative.
The EU should start with dropping Xitter and then start using their Mastodon server.
Don’t they always.
