table 1. online harms in scope in the government report just released is a good summary of the problems....but it would be possible to do better - for me, it would be nice to pull out the applicable law (to the left most column) and discuss its adequacy e.g. in extending laws about publishing lies during elections (making sure law that appies to print and broadcast media applies to internet channels in the same way, etc etc)...
so on the technical side, we then have the problem of provenance/attribution. compliance with takedown requests (whether content is illegal, offensive or just wrong) can be driven by social pressure - so we need to know also if the content creator/distributor, and the compainers are legit - this needs accountable id - so it could be possible to use the same tech we might develop (and has been around in some research outputs 15+ years ago) to have a low cost mechanism for online channels to carry out "Know Your Customer" as much as banks do - but to use 3rd party credential providers (in the same way a bar can check "are you over 18" without having to know anything else about you...). this would then mean that we can verify things - and in the event of actually illegal content, with appropriate checks and balances, map the online pseudonym to an actual person....
advantage is also that it can be used for alibis too:-)
of course, some people still require genuine anonymity - e.g. whistleblowers or folks working under dangerous regimes - and that requires enough cover traffic from apparently non anonymous or just pseudonymous users, to work effectively.....
that also probably means we need to think about rate limiting the creation of new accounts and figuring out what tolerable rates are (they won't be zero)
all of this would need another report - which maybe the Turing Institute could offer to advise on:-)
so on the technical side, we then have the problem of provenance/attribution. compliance with takedown requests (whether content is illegal, offensive or just wrong) can be driven by social pressure - so we need to know also if the content creator/distributor, and the compainers are legit - this needs accountable id - so it could be possible to use the same tech we might develop (and has been around in some research outputs 15+ years ago) to have a low cost mechanism for online channels to carry out "Know Your Customer" as much as banks do - but to use 3rd party credential providers (in the same way a bar can check "are you over 18" without having to know anything else about you...). this would then mean that we can verify things - and in the event of actually illegal content, with appropriate checks and balances, map the online pseudonym to an actual person....
advantage is also that it can be used for alibis too:-)
of course, some people still require genuine anonymity - e.g. whistleblowers or folks working under dangerous regimes - and that requires enough cover traffic from apparently non anonymous or just pseudonymous users, to work effectively.....
that also probably means we need to think about rate limiting the creation of new accounts and figuring out what tolerable rates are (they won't be zero)
all of this would need another report - which maybe the Turing Institute could offer to advise on:-)
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