Theoretically it now does not seem too difficult that data science could actually identify who these people are based on the amount of metadata we all generate. Are there attempts to be preemptive in this regard?
The same kind of "data science" that associated many people and businesses named after the Egyptian goddess with an Islamic terror group and took automatic action against them?
I think we need to move to some way to identify actual people on the internet. I don't mean that in a "use your real name and upload your passport"-kind of way, but in a "we can 100% reliably tell you've been a twat in the past, whomever you are, so no new signups for you"-kind of way that also accounts for all the various interests such as right to privacy and anonymity.
Many platforms use phone numbers for that now, which is obviously far from perfect as I can easily get 100 of those today if I wanted to.
That's not a ludicrous idea. India requires activity be logged to a specific individual,
for instance. Seems a bit dystopian for my sensibilities though.
It doesn’t have to be that apocalyptic. Take the literal traffic enforcement for example. Driving faster than the speed limit gets traffic fines. Cities have cameras for red light or toll booth violations and have databases of offenders.
"Databases of offenders" is different from "database of people who haven't yet done anything but statistically we think might". I could be reading it wrong, but it sounded to me like the parent comment was talking about predicting people who might post such videos _before_ they did. I don't think you'd need to theorize about using data science to ban people after they post some number of violating videos.
Social media companies can be passive, reactive, proactive, or predictive in their efforts to ban bad actors. How much effort are they putting in at each level? It seems more towards the least effort.
Just because we can imagine it going wrong doesn't mean it will go wrong or it must go wrong. The role of science fiction is to explore possible futures, not to make the future taboo.
Do we need to be way more careful with how we design our society? Yes. Does it make sense to abandon possible solutions because of a movie? No.
