Let’s say I live under an oppressive regime (don’t we all?) How can I use social media anonymously, so I don’t face reprisals from the government?
Mastodon, Lemmy, Reddit and other social media platforms restrict users who connect through TOR or a VPN.
Is there any way I can create an account on these services and use them anonymously?
Thanks in advance for any information and advice you can provide.
Only mildly sarcastic, but even if you’re trying to be careful, you reveal a lot about yourself by making comments at all or interacting with a community at all. Your interests, your writing style, your browser footprint, etc. etc. It’s very difficult to not be truly unique if someone out there is purposefully tracking you as an individual. Depending on where the instance is hosted, they may be required to keep server logs and may further be required to divulge those to police for lawful investigations. “Lawful” obviously can vary widely in interpretation, depending on local corruption levels. I know that if I was of interest in an investigation it would not be hard at all to link me to my real identity, and I just sort of live with that.
And the neat part about that is… it used to be very expensive to do it. Now it blew right on through free, and into highly profitable. So it can be done to everyone everywhere at every moment.
No one knows how many people the Nazis employed to spy on the rest. Some estimates are like 1/4 of the population spied on the others! Today? We can put that to shame using only 0.01% or w/e of our population to spies on the rest. B/c that 0.01% has surveilance tools unimaginably powerful compared to anything the Nazis dreamed about.
There is a place in the world for targeted surveilance of bad people, mass murders, drug kingpins, w/e. You get a judge to sign off, and go to town. But dragnet surveilance of everyone at all times erodes the foundation of free societies.
Fuck! Never even thought about like that.
Everything in your post is too well put together. I think we just found Edward Snowden’s Lemmy account.
What 😨
It’s not completely impossible. We still don’t know who Satoshi Nakamoto is, for example.
I know instances will have to divulge logs if ordered, hence my bid to use TOR/VPN. If there is no way to do that, then I will think of some other way to communicate with people.
We are not state actors.
Whatever man.
I change up my writing style pretty much constantly.
And I switch between muliple accounts on several services, each representing a different fictional character.
And I use a VPN.