A liars Tax

A modest proposal to remove some of the malicious misinformation on the internet without killing 230.

Have all users pay a small bond say $10 to an org of their own choosing in exchange for something not entirely dissimilar to an ssl cert that certifies that they are an actual person not identity #53434 created by a script and that they will not use it to sign provably false statements or those that are undertaken with reckless disregard for the truth.

Allow anyone to risk a fee designed to deter frivolous claims in order to challenge an existing bonded statement. This can be more than the $10 if needed but it is not lost if the claim is provably true. A small fee to be retained by the agency to cover its costs either way. For example it may require one to risk $30 to receive $8. Attacking things that are questionable but not outright lies would be non productive. Attacking broadly shared falsehoods that are trivially verifiable would be.

Social media platforms can require a bond in good standing to create an account. Bots would become expensive and ephemeral sources of income for scripts hunting for them. Nobody would bother to create bots for major platforms any longer as it would be non viable.

The individuals running the cert providers wouldn't turn into the ministry of truth because they would go out of business if everyone took their business elsewhere.

Ultimately permissive cert providers that dismiss all claims would be equally non viable because no providers have to accept their certs for account creation or posting.

Platforms can also allow you to sign statements which ought to be visually indicated by your browser for extra visibility or can require all posts to be signed (also visually indicated). Optionally they can provide a check to help users test their own shared media to see if what they are sharing is something so obviously wrong and stupid that a script can identify the bullcrap you are trying to post. See the flat earth, lizard people, or Rathensperger's brother works for China conspiracies.

The third time they have to pay an extra $10 or stop posting on Facebook they are liable they are likely to start doing actual fact checks themselves.

None of this stops dubious networks like parler or gab either having no certification requirements or having a certification authority that forwards fact checks to /dev/null but browsers can be configured with a list of legitimate certification authorities and be configured to show a visible indication that the page is untrusted for example a red outline around the entire page area.

This list should be provided by the browser/computer/OS vendor but be user editable so that if the user can decide to trust the gab certification authority they can do so. This ability will not destroy the utility of the system which is that most information exchanged on the internet will require a small amount of skin in the game making spreading deliberate lies difficult and expensive.

Networks whose only claim to fame is that they will allow any hideous misbehavior the users please to entertain will never be the majority of the internet.

The obvious question is what is the implications for anonymity on the internet. Your cert authority would not receive a notification for every action you take on the internet but they would be liable to both know who exactly who you are and any statement that was challenged. They would probably know broadly what sites you interacted with.

This information would under court order be subject to seizure by the government. Such a system isn't resilient against a repressive regime but neither is the system we have now as it is used by 99.9% of users today.

I can imagine it also serving to allow more John Doe lawsuits to be launched against individuals more easily as there is now a viable party to sue to reveal the identity of the poster but this is already a problem given that most users can in fact be unmasked by their ISPs now.