• pingveno@lemmy.ml
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    2 years ago

    They’re trying to create the infrastructure to lord over regular users.

    It’s not so much that. It’s that journalists are, by their nature, very tied to their reputation for accuracy. Having a system for verification is helpful for the general public to know that the person is at least who they say they are.

    Contrast that with a situation that Lemmy has had where a person keeps creating accounts with the display name of one of the admins and posting disgusting porn. I think they finally got bored and went away, but what if that was a larger campaign waged over years? Identity verification provides at least some baseline for trust.

      • pingveno@lemmy.ml
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        2 years ago

        Depends on what metric you evaluate people’s content by, if you want to be seen as Lord Journo the teller of Truf I don’t care if you work at Washington Post or not. I don’t want it.

        You might not care about that, but many people do. I want to know if someone has fact checkers looking over their shoulder or whether they’re free to pull claims out their ass till the cows come home. That’s not a matter of prestige, but rather one mechanism for establishing a basis for trust.

        Is the situation you describe because of the state of Lemmy, or that the Lemmy admins are uniquely targeted for impersonation?

        It’s because Lemmy allows setting a display name that shows up almost identically to a local name. If it continues to be a problem, my guess is that will be changed.