In the old time, we had a web of trust (WOT) to vote for websites. Can a web of trust for humans help fighting bots?
I imagine I can vouch for a dozen of accounts that they are indeed human. Similarly, other people can vote for me, and so we can build a web of trust. Of course, we will need seeds, but they can be verified accounts or relatively easily established through social media connections and interactions.
I think X and Meta know for quite sure which accounts are bots. But they do not seem interested in offering this knowledge as a service.
The AIs will keep getting better. We are not too far off from having AIs whose purpose is to establish an online presence that makes others believe there is a real person behind. The AI could even post (generated) videos of a fake person doing very mundane activities.
In the end, I think we will very much need the web of trust and attestation and a reputation score for agents in it, but it will need to include real-world in-person interactions, a degree of government support (i.e. emitting physical id cards for people) and companies selling cameras which are capable of authenticating their footage and any metadata the hardware can attach (date and time, global localization signals, additional radio background, background aural noise and background electrical noise from the power network).
On the other end of the chain, people who consume content and want to verify their authenticity (i.e., people who read the news) will need to opt into all of this or stick to established media outlets. Perhaps some countries will pass laws that help an ordinary citizen consume truthful news, and the essence and potential abuses of those laws will be very interesting.
I don't think there is a way to have a decently robust network of trust where people know others are people without actually knowing the identity of those other people. So, of course, this web of trust will be used by criminals and governments to find their marks.
The social cost of allowing AIs to pose as humans is so high that legislating against it may be the worth it.
>I think X and Meta know for quite sure which accounts are bots. But they do not seem interested
At the end of the day remember that you are not the customer, some advertizer is. Puffing the number of users to sell more ads is these services primary function.
Social Media should have "Surface State"
to save the humanity from Deep State.
Interconnected group of vigilante people trying to reveal disguised deep state nefarious intentions before those are put into action.
Elon Musk is the deep state for goodness sake. Social media moguls love collecting your data and selling it for piles of cash. They also love the cash from authoritarian regimes paying for their inability to shut up and having to spend 44 billion for a company, and then using it to manipulate the public.
I imagine I can vouch for a dozen of accounts that they are indeed human. Similarly, other people can vote for me, and so we can build a web of trust. Of course, we will need seeds, but they can be verified accounts or relatively easily established through social media connections and interactions.
I think X and Meta know for quite sure which accounts are bots. But they do not seem interested in offering this knowledge as a service.