Undoing the Original Sin of the Internet: Adding Strong Identity to Meta

The original sin of the Internet was enforced anonymity and lack of strong verification of identity. This is not to say that no one should have the right to be anonymous on the Internet. To the contrary, that’s still critical. What I mean is that we should be able to choose not to interact or not to trust people or entities online if they are not strongly verified. We have been jerry-rigging systems to address this problem ever since the Internet became broadly used. Email spam filters, anti-fraud systems, content filtering, and much much more.?

Facebook finally acknowledged this problem with the announcement of Meta Verified. Mark Zuckerberg describes it as “...a subscription service that lets you verify your account with a government ID, get a blue badge, get extra impersonation protection against accounts claiming to be you, and get direct access to customer support.” All for the low, low price of $11.99 a month. ($14.99 on iOS). For creators running their business on the Meta platforms (FB and Instagram) this becomes potentially something like a seal of approval and a way to increase trust. For consumers, it potentially offers people access to a social graph where they can choose to interact with others they don't actually know personally with a higher degree of trust.

I can’t help but wonder if this is also in part an acknowledgement of the success of LinkedIn, where identities are more strongly verified (not due to any inherent mechanism but due to the fact that people are less likely to blatantly lie about their employment status and to behave badly in a social setting when dealing with people that they might need to work with).?

Elon has been noodling around making verification a broader part of Twitter, although more focused on getting users to pay rather than verifying identity. That said, when fakes flooded the revamped blue check system, Twitter quickly pulled the plug largely because it couldn’t afford to have anyone impersonating giant drug companies and offering free insulin.

With a strong identity comes many benefits. You can elect only to interact with other people who are verified. You can transact with merchants or vendors that are verified and more easily spot fakes. The cost of creating a fake identity online that other people will take seriously goes way up, discouraging bad actors. Facebook is not the Internet but its move to add verification adds some real heft to this trend.?

Even further down the value stack, this move calls into question the other original sin — designing the Internet around the Attention Economy and giving things away in order to sell people’s attention. I wonder, as well, whether the rise of ChatGPT might have had something to do with this announcement — because the ability of Generative AI to create fake social content and personae could pretty quickly flood existing moderation and safety systems, if it's not doing so already. There is some evidence that ChatGPT negatively impacts performance of search ads, and Google is certainly thinking about this.

To be clear, ChatGPT does not affect social ads in Facebook but may serve as a warning shot against the way the overall ad networks work because it’s unclear that people will be interested in ads if they are engaging in a conversation rather than a search.?And maybe, just maybe, we will learn the giving everything away in order to drive clicks and views was actually a false choice — that the world and people are ready to pay for an Internet they can trust.

This will not happen overnight. But in much of the developed world, $10 per month is not a large sum of money and it it transforms your online experience into something more delightful, then a good number of people might fork it over.

None of this is to say the anonymous Internet should go away. Everyone should have the right to be anonymous online, if they choose -- in social media or elsewhere. This is important for protecting the sharing of ideas and the role of online media as a place for political dissent and protest. I would never expect strong verification to show up on a place like Reddit, where the conversation can be rollicking and its clearly caveat emptor when it comes to what you read. It will also be possible for verified people to continue to behave badly and commit fraud.?

But we all should have a choice to interact with people and organizations that we can trust. With verification systems, the friction of creating a believable fake online presence with malicious intent will be that much greater and the cost that much higher. That’s a fair compromise for keeping the good parts of the Internet while enabling us to avoid the bad parts of the Internet. I’m not sure I love the idea of government ID as the ultimate in verification but right now, that’s one of the better alternatives and I welcome this experiment.

(P.S. — not throwing shade all the interesting Web3 DID systems — they are just not ready for mass market yet from my experience.)