Last week, millions of Reddit users were deceived by bots sent by the University of Zurich in the Change My View subreddit. In total, more than 1,700 comments were written, impersonating victims of abuse or individuals with controversial ideologies.
Faced with this operation, which violated Reddit's community guidelines, the company considered it an "inappropriate and highly unethical experiment" and decided to file a complaint with the University of Munich. But that's not all, because in order to protect the platform's users, Reddit is going to implement a major action.
Anonymity on Reddit?
This Monday, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman, announced in a message that the social network would collaborate with third-party services to verify users' identities. In the rest of his statement, he added: “Specifically, we’ll need to know if you’re human and, in some places, if you’re an adult. But we never want to know your name or identity.”
However, there are no further details on this measure taken by Reddit, which is in the sights of the British regulator. Indeed, a spokesperson for the social network declined to explain in which situations users will have to prove their identity.
And he did not communicate on the third-party services that the company will use, nor on the type of information that will be required. This is despite the fact that many platforms today use tools like Persona, Alloy, Stripe Identity, Plaid, and Footprint that require identity to validate this process.
A threat to all users?
If this measure were to be implemented on Reddit, some people fear the risks to their privacy and data security. It must be said that on this platform, users share quite sensitive experiences, and sharing personal information on social media can become a significant problem.
Worse still, the US government could ask Reddit to provide details about someone who shares an idea or discusses a sensitive topic. This has already been the case for the company Meta, which had to transmit private conversations between a woman and her 17-year-old daughter about abortion. This led to felony charges for both individuals.
But Reddit is aware of this risk and wants to avoid it. Indeed, Huffman specifies that only essential information will be transmitted to validate your identity and that the company does not want to know their first and last names.
To emphasize his point, he adds this: “Anonymity is essential on Reddit”, while saying that he “will continue to push back against excessive or unreasonable requests from public or private authorities”. Thus, we will have to wait for the deployment of this measure to really know what will be asked of the platform’s users.
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