-
A suggestion on how we deal with bots in social media
Posted by on November 1, 2025 at 8:51 pmBefore I say anything I just want to preface this first: I have very little knowledge about what I’m talking about here and recognize that some/all of the ideas may be foolish. I’m here to learn and I recognize the extent of my ignorance, so please tell if I’m misunderstanding/wrong about something. If you can, try and say what I could change to have a better approach. If not, no problemo, just hearing that something is problematic is enough to try and think of it from another angle.
Anyways….
It seems like bots are eroding our society, full stop. Anywhere you go online is saturated with bot-nonsense from all sorts of people/organizations with competing agendas, and it’s often specifically for the purpose of breaking down communication in a country and inflaming emotions.
I’m Canadian and literally grew up thinking of America as the symbol of freedom and innovation (I realize this may be problematic to some but bear with me here if you can). Sure, I was and still am very proud of my country, but the USA seemed like a giant older brother you looked up to despite being a little rough on the edges. Seeing what concentrated influence campaigns have done to the country and its people is, frankly, devastating. And Canada is hot on their heels. We can’t keep accepting this manipulation moving forward.
What if we had an authentication app specifically tied to your identification to verify there’s an actual human being on the end of that comment, all while remaining mostly anonymous to the involved parties?
When I had this idea there were a couple red flags that came to mind:
- Trusting tech companies with government ID is a terrible idea (for very obvious reasons)
- Trusting the government to police your online activities is a terrible idea (for obvious reasons, ie – fascism)
- Keeping all of the data confidential from attacks would be incredibly difficult if stored in one database.
- It would have to be set up in a way that you could remain anonymous to other social media users, and also privately on the verification/social-media service, all while having your identity tied to your account.
Keep in mind, this would be a verification service that only ensures you are a human, that’s it. It doesn’t police what you say or what you sign up for, only that you are a human and have only one account. The main purpose is that if you get banned by admins, you stay banned and can’t just make another account.
So here’s what I’m thinking: A centralized application that you submit your identification to and will store your information. When signing up to a social media site, it will ask you to verify you’re human through the application. The site will have to pre-set this up through the service to allow authentication.
To keep everything anonymous, the application will generate a code (like an authenticator app) and ask you to copy and paste it into the site to verify your identity. Once the process is complete, the authenticator app HAS to delete this code and any other information that can tie you to the site (including the fact that it generated a code at all for the site).
In the event that you do get banned, the site will delete your account as usual but also send a ping to the verification service that you can no longer generate codes for this site. This means that the site will never get any identifiable information through the application, and that the application will never be able to match your identity to any content you posted on the site (except the fact that you’re banned). Obviously any identifiable information you post on the site is on you. If a government becomes fascist in the future, or because of hackers, you do not want any information tied to you that can be decided “problematic”.
Someone could totally use someone else’s verification code for something and honestly I have not been able to figure out how you would get around that without gross privacy violations, but I feel like this would be a step in the right direction?
And that’s the gist of it!
Like I said, I’m not someone who could make this happen, and could be grossly misunderstanding how something like this could work. Please let me know your thoughts or any issues (technical, moral, logical or otherwise). I’ve got severe ADHD, sometimes I get too excited over an idea and completely gloss over major contradictions. If that’s the case, please tell me so I can delete this post ASAP.
Also, if anyone wants to take this and run with it, I’d be very proud to have produced the idea and you have my complete blessing to call it your own.
The truth seems more important than ever in the current times, maybe something this could help?
-
1 Reply
-
I’ve been thinking about something similar for a while but honestly this seems….decent?? Im in the same boat about not knowing anything about anything so I’m not one to tell you if you’re wrong but idk I like it.
Log in to reply.