The Internet has turned 50 today. And we still haven't figured out what it is. We confuse it with the web, as if they were synonyms. We assimilate it to social media, as if it were all there. And above all we have no idea how it works.Today a young member of the public, very digital and very social, inspired by a film director, also young and digital, on Twitter announced that he is working for a law that obliges anyone who opens a social profile to give an identity card. Why? Because, he says, the web has become a sewer. Last example, the anti-Semitic insults to Senator Liliana Segre.
Privacy, the proposal of the Renzians: "To open a social profile you have to deposit an identity document"
Let's go with order. The proposal does not make sense for two reasons: the first is that today there is no real anonymity on social networks and on the net; when we navigate we are identified by an IP address, an acronym that stands for Internet Protocol, which indicates exactly where the computer or mobile phone is connected to the network when we send a message. The police post, if it thinks you've committed a crime, finds you right away. It must be said that it is possible to navigate by hiding the IP, or by concealing one's own identity, but this – and this is the second reason – is a human right sanctioned by the United Nations to defend the free manifestation of dissent (read the report of the UN special envoy for freedom of expression of 2015). Dictatorships cancel anonymity.If then the objective of the proposal is to identify and punish the two hundred haters who every day offend the life senator Liliana Segre, it must be said that they are almost all people that not only the postal police can easily identify, but who put the face behind those insults. They don't hide.
The truth is that, as Segre said, racists should not only be punished, they should be treated. Do we really want to impose 30 million Italians who use social media to give their identity cards because of 200 racists? Among other things, those who want to insult anonymously could do so using a foreign IP address to register for social media. What are we talking about? Of nothing.
Does this mean that we have to keep the web as it is? No. Just today Tim Berners Lee, who created it 30 years ago (the web, not the Internet!), Said that the work started a year ago with experts and enthusiasts to save the web from the pushers of false news and hate, is at the finish line. In a month the final proposal will be published: the web contract. This is the proposal that counts. Made by who knows what we're talking about. The rest is crap.
Source link
https://www.repubblica.it/dossier/stazione-futuro-riccardo-luna/2019/10/29/news/identita_social-239796469/
