I don’t think that’s how it works? It’s the client application that has the key for the end to end encryption, not the server. I don’t think you need to trust the matrix server you use? I could be wrong, I don’t know matrix particularly well.
Yeah, that’s fair enough, though I’m not sure it’s very different from malicious instances creating normal user accounts?
You can see when users from an instance are all suspiciously voting the same way at the same time regardless of whether they are usernames or IDs.
There’s lots of legitimate users that only vote but never post so doing it based on that doesn’t seem very effective?
The second problem is solved using public key cryptography, the same way that you can’t impersonate someone else’s username to post comments. Votes and comments are digitally signed (There would need to be a different public key for voting to maintain pseudonymity though).
How about pseudonymous as a compromise? Votes could be publicly federated but tied to some uuid instead of the username. That way you still have the same anti spam ability (can see that a user upvoted these things from this instance at this time) but can’t tie it directly to comments or actual user accounts without some extra osint.
It might be theoretically possible to correlate the uuids with an account’s activity and dox the user in some cases, especially with some instances having a single user, but it would be very difficult or impossible to do on larger instances and would add an extra layer. Single user instances would be kind of impossible to make totally private anyway because they can be identified by instance.
It sounds like they controlled for that and did a bunch of different statistical models to break it down by different demographics and economics. That said, I’m finding it hard to find the original paper. It’s not linked to in the article or any of the AP versions I found. Nature has a link to Google scholar but that comes up with nothing and it’s not referenced in the researcher’s publications on the Oxford site yet. Maybe it went to the press already but the actual article isn’t out yet?
It does sound very broad though and difficult/impossible to draw any causation. Still interesting through as it does kinda show that any negative causative link that might exist between well-being and internet use is not strong enough to outweigh other positive factors that are correlated with it (even non-causative ones).
Hmmm…
That looks pretty paywally to me. That said, I’m all for people supporting independent media.