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Reddit and FaceID Verification (thelemmy.club)
submitted 5 months ago by to c/privacy@lemmy.ml
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Reddit CEO says facial verification may be introduced. Ostensibly to prevent bots.

But we all know how dangerous this can be. But most likely Reddit users will just accept it.

Although they have a great free analogue right under their noses - Lemmy. Which is many times better than its competitor.

I wish more people would discover Lemmy, but that's unlikely.

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[–] 23 points 5 months ago (27 children)

I mean, requiring FaceID is a horrible idea, but there maybe might be a better alternative (I'm talking about the general idea of a "proof of humanity" online, not specifically using this solution).

The fact of the matter is that bots are a massive issue online. When russia got sanctioned and cut off from the western Internet, r/Conservative went radio silent for a couple of days - until they figured out how to VPN through the Netherlands. There are whole communities where bots discuss bot-posted content. And I have no doubt in my mind that it will also happen on Lemmy as soon as there's even a hint of profit* to be found.

* "profit" not as in "monetary gain", but as "any kind of gain, be it money, influence, propaganda, chaos", etc., etc.

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  • [–] 10 points 5 months ago

    Every so often r/conservative traffic dies down and the subreddit turns much more centrist. It's never liberal by any stretch but you'll actually see lots of criticism poke through. Same thing happens with r/politics occasionally. Reddit is just astroturfed so heavily that there isn't a point to it anymore. You have worse than a coinflips odds on replying to an actual human.

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  • [–] 3 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    Worldcoin requires you to use their Orb device to sign up, and you can buy a verified account for $20.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

    There are alternatives we could use.

    A bunch of European countries already have "e-IDs" that can share very limited data with a service provider. For instance, Sweden has "Bank ID" (ID generated by you bank), which you can use to, for example, sign in to your housing association's website. This gives them your name and registered address, immediately giving you the site for your particular community.

    You could use a system like that to send only the "this is a human" token. Potentially also "this is an adult", without giving away any of your personal details, including your date of birth.

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  • [–] 2 points 5 months ago (23 children)

    Why not use the bots to build bot detectors or categorize places online that are heavily botted, look for patterns and collect data for others to research.

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  • [–] 4 points 5 months ago (21 children)

    It's a LOT easier to make bots fake being human than it is to detect bots faking being human.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago (20 children)

    So a computer can't ever truly generate a random number but it can generate total random dialogue.

    I think we just didn't make an effort to catalog and look hard enough to identify these patterns.

    I feel like if we started to truly look at the most obvious place we could see a lot of things that can be used to identify.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago (19 children)

    Think of it this way: there are billions of types of online interactions where detection is either impossible (an image or link post) or extremely difficult (general conversation where sometimes even humans don't sound like humans due to slang/education/etc).

    Not only that, you'd end up with a "tug of war" where the existence of such detectors would power the improvement of the bots, which would require the improvement of the detector (which is always more difficult).

    And the other option is an anonymous token that defines you as a human user. Which is simpler and cheaper to implement?

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (18 children)

    I think you're wrong. Completely wrong. There are billions of messages but any intelligent person knows you don't go through each one by one.

    Do you ever see those guys who can look at a picture of a tree in a field and identify where it is in the world. There's billions of trees. How do they do that with precision?

    Classification.

    They can train their bots on whatever they want. The human is smarter. If they tune them, you use the methods and knowledge learned and adapt. Like generating random numbers, there's limits almost always. You don't find them by inaction.

    4chan a website full of racist, neo nazi and pedophiles were just goofing around and they do insane OSNIT research. Lemmy is fucking around with beans and moths. I don't know. I'm just saddened by the state of things and how much better everybody else is at things I always thought the left was good at. It's just been eye opening to see.

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  • [–] 3 points 5 months ago

    "the left" is not a monolith. A lot of people have various relationships with"the left". I don't identify with "the left" much because I disagree, strongly, with being put in a groupthink box. I happen to have some beliefs that the groupthink box on the left has vhemently and painfully attacked me for. But I also REALL REALLY REALLY think the right is wildly wrong, because they're being simplistic, stupid, and very very corrupt. And I STRONGLY object to corruption. I happen to genuinely and unironically love my country and the promise of a fair chance for all. I love clean water. Clean air. A healthy wilderness ecosystem you can spend time in. Hard work that does good for the world. I love the freedom to research, honestly, and speak freely and without fear.

    I don't see the right sharing some key parts of those values these days. But I'm concerned the left has become too inactive, too sullen, too much a party of victims who lash out reactively.

    Don't have a solution yet except to vote.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago (16 children)

    The human is smarter

    So, you want to hire hundreds of thousands of moderators? The human is smarter, yeah, but not the bot doing the detection.

    If they tune them, you use the methods and knowledge learned and adapt

    You say it like "tuning them" is a magic trick, where they wave their hands a couple of times, and now the detection algorithms are smarter than the bots writing the comments. SOMEONE has to go in, and figure out the maths to make the detection algorithms smarter and better at detecting. That takes time and resources.

    You're also forgetting that "tuning them" works both ways. The people writing the shit-post bots also work on improving their tools, to make them indistinguishable from human posts.

    Also: how can you tall that "lol, kys noob" is written by a human, or by a bot? The vast majority of comments online are these short shit-comments.

    I’m just saddened by the state of things and how much better everybody else is at things I always thought the left was good at

    1. 4chan is not "magically" "good" at "OSINT". They fuck up a lot of things too. It just so happens that what they're most famous for required one dude who wrote a script, a bunch of kids with bandwidth to spare.
    2. Their OSINT is super iffy, hit-and-miss. Much like Reddit's. Or any other large enough community's.
    3. What @AnotherUsername@lemmy.ml said.
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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (15 children)

    So, you want to hire hundreds of thousands of moderators? The human is smarter, yeah, but not the bot doing the detection.

    I don't know where this is coming from. Nobody is being hired. If anything I'm becoming more anti-mod lately. I feel like put boxes on things that suck oxygen out of the room rapidly. But that's a different discussion.

    Maybe I'm reading this wrong but to clarify I am not saying we need to build our own bot detection but I would be a nice have eventually. I am saying we should be crowd sourcing our collective anger and ADHD or Autism or whatever drives us to post bean moth lemmy slop and instead focus on collection of the worst bot infestations. There are patterns. Bots are not random enough that they can't be identified with large crowd sourced efforts. They're also in their infancy which means it will only get harder going forward.

    You or I aren't able to avaliable accurately tell right now. Have you ever seen the Sinclair news video? The one where every news station repeats the same dialogue. Can you or I flip on the news any day of the week and call that out, unlikely. But we can logical understand it is something that happens. It becomes obvious there is a script only when you collect the data and begin to analyze it. That is what I'm saying we need to figure out and gamify.

    Name generation, text, patterns. At the start it won't be accurate. But as more data is collected it'll become obvious. If the bots were that good, these websites would have left their APIs open. But they closed them so we can't collect this data. I'm the type of person when powerful people do something like that, I want to know why and work around that. It's not a coincidence that they locked their sites up when people were given tools where anyone could collect data and feed it into AI for analysis.

    Our inaction to do anything when the greatest opportunities are right in front of us but slipping away is a tragedy of this generation.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago (14 children)

    I am saying we should be crowd sourcing our collective anger and ADHD or Autism or whatever (...) and instead focus on collection of the worst bot infestations.

    That's what "being a moderator" is, mate. You want hundreds of thousands of moderators.

    There are patterns. Bots are not random enough that they can’t be identified with large crowd sourced efforts

    You're wrong.

    It becomes obvious there is a script only when you collect the data and begin to analyze it.

    You just said:

    I am not saying we need to build our own bot detection

    So, which is it?

    It becomes obvious there is a script only when you collect the data and begin to analyze it.

    There's a massive difference between local news stations receiving a script to read out, and a bot farm having a "be negative, unfriendly, sow chaos" instruction.

    At the start it won’t be accurate

    So, it just won't work? Got it.

    But as more data is collected it’ll become obvious

    I don't think you undersand what you're talking about. Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to be contrarian here, I just honestly think that your idea of "AI bots" is kind of like "we have prepared one million sentences, and now our bots will be picking between them to generate whole posts on social networks".

    I mean, sure, there can be patterns - like the whole "LinkedIn post" style, where most of the time it's fairly obvious that you're reading an AI-generated slop... But that's not what state-entities or even just hackers use. They have access to much more sophisticated content.

    If the bots were that good, these websites would have left their APIs open.

    Reddit's API is no longer open. Didn't do a thing to stop bots.

    But they closed them so we can’t collect this data

    You don't need however many API keys to collect that kind of data. At least not from Reddit.

    Our inaction to do anything when the greatest opportunities are right in front of us but slipping away is a tragedy of this generation.

    Your proposed action is the equivalent of Sisyphus and his stone. Because you really seem to be forgetting that the AI tech is getting better all the time. And that any AI-detection actions you take feed that process. "Oh, they've detected these posts? OK, let's tweak the algo until we get through and then flood them with our content".

    Let's even assume that you somehow pull it off and get a 100% detection rate as of right now. Six months down the line that will go down to 20%. Etc. etc. And you'll be catching thousands of legitimate users in the crossfire.

    An anonymous "proof of humanity" token solves all AI issues without anyone having to spend billions on research and manpower.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago (13 children)

    It's just building and gamify strategically. There's no magic here. It works. Bots can adapt all they want. They're still constraint and limited by technology and money.

    What is magic is humans ability to use inference and deduction to see things that are not right in front of us. It's hard to see this online especially the way some conversations go.... but regardless of that, people could easily detect patterns that are used in the wild. We just need data. Lemmy communities are perfectly set up for this for now.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago (12 children)

    It’s just building and gamify strategically. There’s no magic here. It works. Bots can adapt all they want. They’re still constraint and limited by technology and money.

    How much of what I wrote so far was done via an LLM?

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago (11 children)

    That's not the point. There is no issue with random people using LLM to craft their messages. The issue is using a network of bots to promote the latest marvel movie. Draw attention to the latest political blunder. Or just groups trying to push people further to the edges politically until nothing works.

    Look at this fucking guy. Likely not a bot. But is an example of someone who is posting pattern is suspicious. It needs to be studied. That's something we can't do. But we can collect and analyze in a way that i think people can get into. I think using the internet and sites like lemmy for this is way more effective any most stuff people are trying to do. This he what the internet was made for and the only people not using it for this seems to be leftist groups.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago (10 children)

    Look at this fucking guy. Likely not a bot. But is an example of someone who is posting pattern is suspicious

    You have just defined why your method doesn't work.

    There is no issue with random people using LLM to craft their messages. The issue is using a network of bots to promote the latest marvel movie

    You either detect AI by their language or you don't.

    But, I think, I know what you mean. Your idea is like Bat-sonar, the super-totally-not-magical computer he built in the second or third Nolan film that allowed him to spy on everybody and thus detect crimes faster.

    You want a system that would monitor ALL content online and detect "patterns". Like, "huh, weirdly, we have XXX number of people writing positively about the new JJ Abrams film", or "check it out, in the past hour we've had 43243 comments negative about MAGA".

    Right?

    If so: mate... You require literal magic to pull it off. WAY too many false positives or just impossible to trace dependencies. You would have to not only monitor for these patterns, but also associate them with any real-world events (ALL events), because maybe a Polish nationalist politician said something about the financing methods of their military, which got popular on russian Twitter, got a funny anti-MAGA retweet by a Ukrainian, ended up as a reaction video on British TikTok, and got posted to Reddit where it got upvoted to r/All and received 43243 100% legitimate comments complaining about MAGA.

    Funnily enough, if anything, MAYBE a complex enough AI system would be capable of finding these patterns, but there's absolutely no physical possibility of humans doing that.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago (9 children)

    Hey,

    What do you think crowd sourcing means. Like what is your definition in relation to building whatever it is you're describing. How did you get there?

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago (8 children)

    What do you think crowd sourcing means

    It means a bunch of people doing working in very narrow fields that need to be connected by someone with an overarching view, but there are so many so small fields, that it's impossible for a human to handle. In this particular case.

    Unless you figured out telepathy. Then I retract my statements - a large enough network of directly connected telepaths could do this.

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  • [–] 0 points 5 months ago* (7 children)

    No it doesn't. That's not it. And this is how i know you're just a terminally online individual arguing out of instinct rather than common sense. Il not be commenting further.

    But to my point. Crowd sourcing these things works. It's a missed opportunity in these early days to be passive and more concerned with bean posts.

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  • [–] 0 points 5 months ago (6 children)

    You just replied with a "nuh-uh!" and call me "terminally online"? That's a good one.

    You seem know a bunch of buzz-words that you don't fully understand, like "crowd sourcing" in this instance. It's like a magic wand, "just crowd source it, and it'll just work", without realising that - again, unless telepathy is involved - a crowd is still just a bunch of individuals. Without instantaneous real time communication no single individual can spot such a massive pattern as those you are after. Without spotting the "big picture", the whole thing is pointless.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago (5 children)

    You can't just magically call everything magical in an attempt to discredit and expect anyone thing you're anybody but dishonest. I'm not spending the evening attempting to keep you on track when you can't be bothered to read and instead you're just looking for bullshit arguments and at worst attempting to discredit for whatever personal reason you have.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago (4 children)

    Again: you're throwing buzz-words around as if they're explanation enough. I'm calling your thinking magical because it is.

    Prove me wrong by explaining how do you envision coordinating "crowd sourced pattern spotting" (something that has never been done in the history of mankind, because it "crowd" and "pattern spotting" are almost direct opposites).

    There are no "personal reasons" for me saying what I'm saying, nor are my comments "attempts at discrediting". There's literally nothing to discredit here, mate.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago (3 children)
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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago (2 children)

    Your proof of your "crowd source this away" idea is a link to a company that very explicitly uses AI to detect trends...? Are you for real right now?

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 child)

    It's evidence that it works. That the missing piece is the crowd source. You said it's impossible and magical. That is wrong. A problem is the datasets are from before the APIs were locked down. It's hard to get new data. New methods are needed.

    Dataset is too technical for what I'm saying. But it's still important here. Communities should be built to combat bots, not ignore the problem. There are ways to identify activity and observe and even interfere to the point that it either costs them too much to keep up or makes them ineffective. But there needs to be the community to build that awareness. Instead it seems like the people that are disadvantaged by these networks and bots also have this mentality to ignore and avoid it all.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago

    It’s evidence that it works. That the missing piece is the crowd source. You said it’s impossible and magical

    The company you linked is 11-13 people. That's not crowd sourcing, it's just AI doing the work.

    So, which is it? Crowd sourcing, or AI fighting AI?

    You said it’s impossible and magical. That is wrong.

    Yeah, the way you were voicing it originally (crowd sourcing through communities) requires magic. If you're suddenly OK bringing in AI of your own, sure, but then you don't need crowd sourcing - as in the example you yourself posted, a dozen people can do this.

    A problem is the datasets are from before the APIs were locked down. It’s hard to get new data. New methods are needed.

    You don't need APIs to do this work. You can easily write clients that just read comments as they appear through regular browser clients. The API lock-down was about preventing people from interacting and posting with the content outside of the official app. You can read content just fine (as far as I'm aware, correct me if I'm wrong).

    Communities should be built to combat bots

    Communities can't do much about it. Sure, they'll ban a bot of five, but your own example showed where the problem lies - you yourself can't tell if a certain user is a bot, or just a propagandist (or passionate about a topic??). Just recently there was a poster on r/cats (or some such) who was banned by mods for being a bot posting AI slop. They had to register a new account, and re-post their photos with a piece of paper with the date and the cat next to each other, the cat just looked weird. But the community mass-reported the post, and the mods didn't notice that it was all legit.

    Community work would not work here, it's been proven a billion times already (see: Brexit, 2016 US elections, Romanian elections, Slovenian elections, etc., etc., where network and social media content analysis showed after the fact that there were hundreds of thousands of bot accounts posting russian propaganda).

    Instead it seems like the people that are disadvantaged by these networks and bots also have this mentality to ignore and avoid it all.

    Much like OP, I agree.

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