Source: Mike Wilson @craftyoldgit on Twitter.

Collected Parody Tweets

Published in

Political Engineering

4 min readNov 12, 2022

The recent chaos on Twitter demonstrates a point I’ve been arguing in this blog, that major online platforms should support voluntary strong verification of legal identity, with proper modeling both of humans and non-human legal entities. I have also argued for the importance of archiving. For the benefit of posterity, this article provides an archive of parody tweets I have seen in the past few days. These examples demonstrate the consequences of a lack of competence in identity verification, inadequate user interface support for transparent identity, and weak public awareness of the importance of transparent identity.

In case you care about the boring parts, here are some relevant blog posts.

On Misinformation and Reputation lays out basic arguments for why online reputation is important and why identity and archiving are a necessary inputs to reputation.
Accountability, Anonymity, and “The White Man’s Gambit” explores some of the arguments against transparent identity online and why they are flawed.
On Transparent Identity argues that transparent identity matters online.
The Cost of Privacy explains that the right to privacy is not absolute, and how online privacy is exploited for fraud and deception.
Why Accountability Matters lays out the connection between legal identity, archiving and accountability, and how accountability makes media systems safer.
How to Fix New Media, a draft from early 2020 that I didn’t make public at the time.

Enjoy!