Vitalik: X Platform's "Display Account Country" Feature Will Only Have a Short-Term Positive Effect
BlockBeats News, November 24th, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin shared in a post regarding the prediction of the "Displaying Account Country" feature:
In the short term, it will bring about many positive effects.
In the medium term, experienced players will find ways to disguise themselves as being from a different country. There are countless methods to rent someone else's passport, phone number, IP address, and so on. It would be somewhat difficult to fake 1 million accounts with fake locations, but it would be very easy to fake one account with a false location and then operate it to 1 million followers.
Six months later, those political water army accounts that are actually located in a random Eurasian country but operate under names like "Defenders of Western Civilization" will most likely change their location tags to "USA" or "UK."
(The above is what I think will happen, not what I hope to see. What I hope for is:
(i) We can truly see different communities' views on different topics, and this is not an easily forgeable signal.
(ii) These "communities" are not just highly identifiable narrow labels such as countries or educational backgrounds but a more widespread, spontaneous, multi-source evidence-based structure.
However, I believe that it is very difficult to keep such a system robust in an adversarial environment.)
Upon further reflection, I also agree with the points made by the respondents: it is inappropriate to display a user's country without their consent and without providing any opt-out option (even without a "disable account" last resort option). In most cases, displaying country information will still maintain a large anonymous set, but there are indeed some people for whom even a few bits of data leakage are very dangerous. They should not be unilaterally deprived of privacy by the platform without any remedy.
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