The human internet is dying.

• Facebook has shut down 5.4 billion fake accounts this year
• Two-thirds (66%) of all tweeted links were shared by suspected bots.
• Reddit is full of bots: thread reposted comment by comment, 10 months later

AI has created some big problems with election integrity, spam in public consultations, spam in ourcommons.ca petitions, disinformation, and foreign interference. Here I propose an extension to the "Sign-In Partner" government of Canada service that could help tremendously. Prove you're a unique human Canadian without revealing anything else about you.

Problem

Social media accounts can be used to promote products, bury stories, astroturf, and influence elections. That's why accounts can be sold for money. Part of that business are click farms where low wage workers do social media actions all day to generate fake accounts that seem real.

Now we have AI that can write believable paragraphs on social media, generate low quality educational videos, and write made up news stories. In summary there are big incentives to fill the internet with garbage, and with AI it costs pennies to do it.

We've passed the golden age of the human internet, and it gets worse as AI gets better.

Solution

The government of Canada can enhance the existing Interac "Sign-In Partner" service to provide a "proof of humanity" (PoH). Canadians can use it to give any third party website this PoH without providing any other private information or correlations.

Here's how.

1. A Canadian logs into the government of Canada platform using a "Sign-In Partner".
2. The Canadian types in any website address, like "facebook.com" or "reddit.com" (or an anonymous challenge token from the third party).
3. The government generates a PoH token for the Canadian. This is just a long number (cryptography).
4. The Canadian goes to the third party website and creates a new account.
5. The third party website uses the token to confirm that this is a Canadian human who has never before made an account on their website.

The user experience can be simplified - these steps are just to illustrate how it works.

Privacy Features

• Tokens are unique to the website address. This means that two different websites have no way of knowing the same person signed up to both of them.
• There is no way websites can identify Canadians using the generated token.
• Third parties do not need to register with the government. Developers and business owners can just deploy the new feature to their website using open standards. As easy as a captcha.
• If we enhance the steps slightly (third party generates a challenge token) then the government never knows which websites the Canadian used the service for.
• Neither the government nor Interac need to store any token or private data whatsoever. No logs, no database.

Isn't this just a captcha?

No. The government PoH proves you are a unique human and Canadian.

Captchas still have their uses, but you can pay a click farm pennies to complete these challenges for you. A captcha merely proves you are not a bot signing up for one million accounts in one minute.

A Whole New World

What kinds of new Canadian businesses could be created using this service?

• A new social media platform where each user account belongs to one unique Canadian.
• A new social media platform where people can choose to hide all bot content if they like.
• A photo sharing website that guarantees its photos are not generated by AI, because if a human breaks the rules, they are suspended or banned. Unlike bans on other websites, these bans are associated to one unique Canadian.
• A news organization could create a comment section that only allows posts from verified human Canadians. Users that get suspended or banned cannot simply create a new account.

Finally, government services like ourcommons.ca petitions or notices of consultation from the Canadian public could guarantee that all petition signatures and feedback is coming from unique Canadians, not Canadian bots, and not foreign influence campaigns.

Conclusion

I would love to use these new social media platforms!

The concept of a proof of humanity is not new. However like passports and borders I think national governments are clearly the best institutions to implement it. If it's not done by government then commercial pressures to monetize will ruin the simplicity, trust, and privacy guarantees. And Canada already has "Sign-In Partners" for government ID vetting (weirdly implemented by Interac, but presumably with strong data privacy controls).

I can think of several more caveats and features, like expiry or signing media, but I think this post is long enough.

Let me know if you have any thoughts, criticism, or feedback! What are the next steps? Proposing this to a government department? Which one? Writing an ISO proposal? Standards Council of Canada?

Thanks for reading.