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Hal Finney, no?
The software engineer, cryptography expert, and cyberpunk who received the first ever Bitcoin transaction and had a neighbor named “Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto”?
Whoosh
Edit: My point was that a couple of kids doing this on a small scale pales in comparison to Meta’s reach. The students didn’t do anything particularly novel, and Meta, which has a much more comprehensive dataset of faces linked to personal information, personal communications, etc, is already using every means available to do the same thing. The college students simply demonstrated what Meta is already doing on a global scale.
Surely the original “someone” is Meta. Good to have a redundant system I guess /s
This problem desperately needs to be fixed, but the solution isn’t some expensive, over-engineered laser LED matrix. The solution is basic headlights that don’t blind people. You know, like every headlight that existed in the US until a few years ago.
Surely it’s not an insurmountable task to use a cheap LED bulb with the optics to give the beam proper directivity—i.e. not direct the beam into the eyes off oncoming drivers. Maybe even make it replaceable with a screwdriver. Call me crazy.
This is a major problem for all democracies, and LLM driven troll accounts probably do exist. But this xitter post is a fake error message. It’s clearly a troll.
Blocking fake accounts would help with the misinformation problem, but it’s a cat and mouse game. It could ultimately give additional credence to the trolls who slip through if the platform is assumed to be safe. The reality is that there will always be ways for fake accounts to avoid detection and to spoof account verification. Making it harder would help, but it’s not a comprehensive solution. Not to mention the fact that the platform itself has the power to manipulate public opinion, amplify their preferred narrative, etc.
The solution I’ve always preferred is the mentality the 4chan community had when I was younger and frequented it. Basically, and I’m paraphrasing:
Everyone here needs to grow up and understand that no post should ever be presumed to be true or legitimate. This is an anonymous forum. Assume that everything was written by a bot or a troll in the absence of proof that it wasn’t.
I think people put too much trust in social media precisely because they assume that there’s a real person behind every post. They assume that a face and a few photos gives an account legitimacy, despite the fact that it’s trivial to copy photos from a random account (2015/16 pro-Trump Facebook style) or just generate all of the content from scratch with AI (to avoid duplicate detection).
Trust itself is driver of misinformation. On social media, people should only fully trust posts made by people they know. That is the simplest and most comprehensive solution to the problem.