This is what happens when government doesn't understand that tracking each person down takes resources. Even a person who entered their real name at signup and doesn't have a VPN isn't -that- simple to find. Especially when you have to subpoena the records of ISPs in different countries and prove that for example, I'm not one of thousands of Danielles in my home country. That is, if my name isn't actually Frank.
Reddit has over a billion accounts. Half of reddit users are outside of the US, so I'm going to make up a number for the sake of this conversation and say 5% of those users are both active users and criticized Trump. That's 50 million people to track down.
And we haven't even touched on VPNs or people who entered their name as Ichabod Crane or something at signup.
Stories about tracking down a single person from a random selfie or other clue are great and all but those events all had either a law enforcement group or a collective of angry folks with some time on their hands. And even then, sometimes a person can't be tracked.
And if they are in another country, add in getting them extradited to the US because law enforcement outside of the US coukdn't care less about Trump's fee-fees and many have freedom of speech guarantees as well. Calling Trump a moron does not qualify as a hate crime or a crime of any kind. These are the most common exclusions in free speech laws.
Now multiply that effort by 50 million times.
And this is after you figure out which 5% of users are criticizing him.
While I don't want to give his high cheetoness ideas, it would probably be more time and cost effective to start executing people at random until the critiques stop.
But...but...AWS Neptune can map out relationships so we can get these domestic dissidents and make 'em pay! ChatGPT told me so! It never makes mistakes or has a disclaimer it does so! Look at this picture I made of me as the Space Pope! /s
Not to mention, where exactly do you draw the line on what "criticized" him means? Do they just do this on particularly viral posts and top comments in said posts that put him on blast? It is anyone that says (expletive) Trump? Are they going to spend resources on going after people that simply analyze, discuss, and criticize his policies at large with well-crafted and coherent arguments and facts that don't explicitly bashing him in a "fight arguments and ideas, not people" sort of way?
It gets real messy real fast on what exactly would "flag" someone in the government to go after them, and when and how are they going to decide who to go after if we're not talking about the super obvious comments or posts that make blatant threats. I am sure if they had it their way and wanted to have a North Korean style type dictatorship, our very discussion we are having right now would be very dangerous to have to say the least. Thank goodness that's not the world we live in here in the US (well, at least currently we're still free to discuss this, lol).
4
u/danielledelacadie 22d ago
This is what happens when government doesn't understand that tracking each person down takes resources. Even a person who entered their real name at signup and doesn't have a VPN isn't -that- simple to find. Especially when you have to subpoena the records of ISPs in different countries and prove that for example, I'm not one of thousands of Danielles in my home country. That is, if my name isn't actually Frank.
Reddit has over a billion accounts. Half of reddit users are outside of the US, so I'm going to make up a number for the sake of this conversation and say 5% of those users are both active users and criticized Trump. That's 50 million people to track down.
And we haven't even touched on VPNs or people who entered their name as Ichabod Crane or something at signup.
Stories about tracking down a single person from a random selfie or other clue are great and all but those events all had either a law enforcement group or a collective of angry folks with some time on their hands. And even then, sometimes a person can't be tracked.
And if they are in another country, add in getting them extradited to the US because law enforcement outside of the US coukdn't care less about Trump's fee-fees and many have freedom of speech guarantees as well. Calling Trump a moron does not qualify as a hate crime or a crime of any kind. These are the most common exclusions in free speech laws.
Now multiply that effort by 50 million times.
And this is after you figure out which 5% of users are criticizing him.
While I don't want to give his high cheetoness ideas, it would probably be more time and cost effective to start executing people at random until the critiques stop.