alt Hacker NewsLet's say the government issues hundreds of thousands of IDs to people who don't exist and uses them to verify bots (or room full of paid humans) that post pro-government messages all day, at "normal" rates that a human posts.
It's amazing how there is a much larger crowd, of completely real people, who approve of the government, than those nasty dissenters. We know they're real people because we trust the government vouching for its own IDs.
And because of the real ID policy, the government can also ask the social media company for the ID used by opposed posters, and find out where they live and "visit" them, maybe "warn" them.
Hooray for democracy!
This sounds like an unreasonable amount of distrust in a government. If a government is truly malicious, it no longer matters if an ID was issued in the first place.
Take the current US administration. If they were to point the finger at a user for something the government didn't like, I doubt many people will agree, and more likely people will be opposed to the government than the user. The most important thing is to prevent government from abusing violence on the people for speaking up, which is somewhat lacking in the US.
More effort should be done to hold governments accountable, not finding ways to skirt around it.