Social media authentication regime would be a face too steep to climb

The Sydney Morning Herald reported three days ago that a report had been tabled in federal Parliament regarding safety and domestic violence, in which there was a suggestion it 

called for users to be required to present 100 points of identification – which could include a driver’s licence, birth certificate, Medicare card, or passport – in order to open or maintain an existing social media account with companies such as Facebook, Instagram or Twitter.

At about the same time, a federal minister announced that she used an anonymous account to conduct some discussions with the community. What might’ve surprised the government – which did not, it must be remembered, make any policy announcement in response to the committee’s report – was the reaction of that respected (but never respectful) community. 

It was, of course, utterly offended. Not that the community is ever short on expressions of hatred aimed at the government. It seems that the outrage mill that runs 24 hours a day is always switching its allegiances, taking up for a few hours one issue or another in its endless cycle of bonding and othering, a relentless attempt to satisfy our collective vanity. 

But let’s think about this briefly in the cold light of day. It’s Easter Monday, after all, and we’re probably all sick and tired of talking with family and might need a break to draw us back to the real world of work and politics, the world away from photos of pets and appeals for sympathy on account of a chocolate overload.

If the government is having a hard time getting vaccinations into people’s arms, and has (we’re told) fallen short of its goal by a wide margin, how much more complex to make each and every person who uses each and every social media platform – submit genuine IDs at a government-run office. And how much more unlikely that Service NSW (for example) or Centrelink would be able to gauge the authenticity of the documents thus tendered for scrutiny by one bleary-eyed functionary or another.

Even if you did get all the correct documents put before the censor and a message sent via an official channel to Twitter’s head office in California, as soon as you’d gotten the routine up and running there would be a news story about a fraud. A woman assaulted by a former partner who’d used subterfuge to get hold of her residential address, a late-night murder perhaps (in the worst case) carried out by an old lover with an axe to grind and with an anonymous account that the government had (incorrectly) said was really a school lteacher.

And what of anonymous accounts? What of the federal minister? Wouldn’t she be able to operate anonymously if she wanted to, given that opening and operating that account would require the use of ID? Why shouldn’t a prominent person who finds the rough-and-tumble of Twitter a bit hard to take – even on the best days – opt for a less bruising method to engage with the demos? If ID were required, surely you’d still be able to have an anonymous account?

The scale of the operation is what’s missing from accounts like that published by the SMH. When the government opened up its purse at the beginning of Covid’s remake of the public sphere, all you had to do was go to Centrelink and report the fact that you were out of work. The money came directly thereafter into your bank account – registered with the authorities for just such emergencies. There was no scrutinising. There were not delays. You weren’t asked to sign a statutory declaration stating that you’d lost your driver’s licence. You didn’t have to go to the post office and apply for a passport.

A passport? Takes two weeks to get a new one if you have all the necessary documents on hand. But say that you have to go to Births, Deaths and Marriages and ask for a new birth certificate? What then? More delay? Meanwhile, in your absence, Twitter continues to spew out a tone of rebarbative bile each and every second, a flow making a mountain of unwatched – except to a few – messaging. A rugged butte made of aggression and spite. A headland of reheated verbiage that quotes TS Eliot and Camus and Orwell at a more than alarming rate. A cornucopia of derivative cliché. A cascade of bumptious kitsch.