IS_A_BILLIONAIRE

You cannot fail to have seen the news that Elon Musk, the noted entrepreneur, has succeeded in buying Twitter. Twitter’s business model will surely have to change as advertising doesn't really bring in enough and it might be hard to attract more advertisers while simultaneously allowing more "free speech". This rather suggests a shift towards more of a subscription model. As a pretty heavy Twitter user myself, I think this is probably the way to go. If things are tiered properly then most users will pay nothing and users with millions of followers will pay a lot, which seems like a pretty reasonable way of organising things.

I would have thought that one way to make Twitter more attractive to those with millions of followers is to ensure that those followers are actually people; surely real people are more valuable to advertisers than bots are? And an obvious way to improve the quality of the discourse is to similarly allow bot-free conversations about important topics in the new public square.

Mr. Musk appears to agree with this view saying that if his bid to take over Twitter were to be successful then he would declare war on bots and “authenticate all real humans”. These are admirable aims. I don’t think bots should be banned from Twitter (after all, many bots are very useful) but it should certainly be made clear in your timeline which posts come from people and which come from bots and you should be able to automatically block bots if you want to.?

The specific problem of bots on Twitter has been raised many times. The entrepreneur Mark Cuban, for example, caused some debate a few years ago by saying that “it's time for @twitter to confirm a real name and real person behind every account”. I’m pretty sure he is wrong about the real name part, because anyone familiar with the topic of “real” names knows perfectly well that they can make online problems worse rather than better. He’s right about the real person though. Let me use a specific and prosaic example to explain why this is and to suggest a much better solution to the bot problem.

Internet dating is a good test case for issues around anonymity and pseudonymity, it is a mass market for identity providers and it is a better test of scale for an identity solution than logging on to do taxes once every year. So. How to bring the benefits of digital identity to this world? One way not to do it is demanding “real” names. When the dating platform OKCupid announced it would ask users to go by their real names when using its service (the idea was to control harassment and promote community on the platform) there was a backlash from the users, and they had to relent.

In fact the necessity to present a real name will often prevent transactions from taking place at all, because the transaction enabler isn’t names, it’s reputations. And pretty basic reputations at that. In this case, just knowing that the object of your affections is actually a real person and not a bot (remember, in the famous case of the Ashley Madison hack, it turned out that almost all of the women on the site were actually bots) is probably the most important element of the reputational calculus central to online introductions.

“Real” names don’t fix any problem because your “real” name is not an identifier, it is just an attribute and it’s only one of the elements that would need to be collected to ascertain the identity of the corresponding real-world legal entity anyway.?

Mr. Musk was very specific with his choice of words. He said that his intention is to authenticate humans, not to identify them. This is an important distinction.

The way forward is surely not for Twitter to try and figure out whether I am a bot or not but to work with people who do. It is much easier just to ask someone else who already knows whether I’m a bot.

There are plenty of candidates. But a rather obvious place to start in the developed world is with the bank. So, when I go to sign up to a social media site, instead of trying to work out whether I’m real or not, the dating site can bounce me to my bank (where I can be strongly authenticated using existing infrastructure) and then the bank can send back a token that says “yes this person is real and one of my customers”. In other words, cryptographic testament to the fundamental attribute IS_A_PERSON.

Mr. Musk has further suggested, in earlier tweets, that Twitter give users who pay for Twitter Blue (the subscription service that adds extra features to users’ accounts) a check mark to show their account has been “authenticated.” This would be distinct from what the Wall Street Journal called the...

"coveted blue check mark that requires accounts to be both authentic and notable”.

As this comment indicates, there are really two distinct things going on here: there is the authentication that Dave Birch is a real person, and the verification that this particular account belongs to the Dave Birch who writes columns on Forbes and plays Dungeons & Dragons. Here’s the need for a three state solution. Once I am “known", then I can go on to be “verified" if I want to be. Again, not by Twitter, but by someone or thing who can attest to the fact, as shown in the diagram below.

In this straightforward scheme, “unknown” users show up in red, “known” users show up in yellow and “verified” users show up in green (and with a blue tick, for historical reasons). Most normal people, I imagine, will leave their Twitter account in the default setting of “known only”. Some people might want to go tighter with “verified only”.

Anne Marie Slaughter summed the situation up well writing in the FT?that...

"with the decline of traditional trusted intermediaries, and the discovery that social media account holders may well be bots, we will crave verifiability”.

This is absolutely spot on, and we need to construct the networks capable of delivering this verifiability or we collapse into a dystopian discourse where no-one believes anything. The knee-jerk “present your passport to use Facebook” or whatever is not the way forward. Technology means that we can deliver verifiability in a privacy-enhancing manner, so let us hope that Mr. Musk will adopt a creative approach that embraces the new possibilities.

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