I mean, okay. But that’s not specific to right-wing stuff.

I’m pseudonymous – “tal” isn’t my given name or surname. I like participating in forums under a pseudonym. I’m not really enthusiastic about forums – like Google Groups – that tried forcing users to use their real names.

Like, if the issue is with use of pseudonyms in general, I don’t think that that’s gonna work, because I would bet that people generally like using forums under pseudonyms.

Pseudonyms reduce use of reputation compared to systems where a real-life identity is involved, because someone can always get a new one.

There are ways to still leverage reputation in pseudonymous environments. So, okay. I’m a pretty prolific commenter. I bet that there are people on here who have learned to recognize “tal”. You can build a reputation associated with a pseudonym, and then people can trust pseudonyms based on the reputation they build.

One thing you can do is to have the software make reputation statistics more-visible. Like, Reddit Enhancement Suite tracked your upvotes and downvotes, and would tell you, next to usernames how many times you’d upvoted or downvoted someone in the past, so that each person had the computer helping you track what you generally thought of their comments in the past.

You could maybe do something like get “expensive” identities that aren’t linked to a real identity. Like, say I need to pay $100 to buy a pseudonym from someone (“[email protected]”). I generate a public/private keypair. I send Verisign the public key and money, and and they cryptographically sign it. At that point, I can be “tal”, but have bans and reputation linked to that underlying ID, and if I get banned or something, it’d cost me 100 bucks to get a new identity. Could have multiple identities, different costs. The problem is that the cost there may not be sufficient to deter someone running a dedicated disinfo campaign. I mean, okay, so say an identity is $100. I buy a thousand, that’s $100,000. If you want to run a disinfo campaign, that’s probably not a lot of money.

Note that with enough money, you can also attack the above “reputation” route, either by paying people to build up an identity – as was probably done to build reputation associated with the “Jia Tan” group’s attack on xz that was in the news recently – or by simply buying accounts from legitimate users who are willing to sell their account.

It may come as a shock, but IRL, I’m not an admiral. lol

I think the takeaway here is to be more critical of what’s presented as fact rather than whether it comes from someone (pseudo)anonymous.