A bad nights sleep and too much coffee - you know what that means! Random ideas!
The “best measure” against keeping out spammers on most social websites is the “captcha” system. This barrier of a “human intelligence task” and perhaps keeping an eye on IP addresses (to detect mass duplicates) helps keeps out spambots. Ah, but what about human users with the intent to spam? Spam will be quickly flagged and removed right? What if it isn’t spam, what if these users are paid to create multiple accounts to look real and spread “normal” messages for the purposes of coercive persuasion?
Am I being paranoid? Is it possible that the people with the money and resources would have the desire and the methods to go beyond short-term and small-time “gaming” of these sites? If big corporations are paying to send lobbiests to our government - is it niave to think they wouldn’t do the same on our democratic/social websites? Is this even happening? Can we stop this? Is it even illegal? If they are creating dupe accounts they are at least violating the TOS of most sites.
A few ideas on how we could go beyond captchas, but they both have the same problem (which I’ll get to).
- Value based authentication - Instead of asking a user to find a phrase jumbled in a picture, why not get them to perform a more advanced task. So you have to work to use any given site - not very effective but this would at least raise the cost on a per-user basis to pay some outsource shop in India to game a given site.
- Perhaps next-gen authentication services after OpenID/Passport could tie into social graphs, like Facebook or Googles new OpenSocial. Any website could choose to devalue/ignore any submission or comment from a user with no friends or that are in closed networks of friends that don’t interweave with the mass population like real friend networks do.
However these two methods can still be cheated with money, users and time. It’s just a bigger road bump to those evil bastards that want to spam us with their selfish view points. Not to mention, like DRM, these systems would make the average honest user just through hoops.
So I don’t know what the right solution is - but is this issue worth talking/thinking about? Or perhaps I should take off my tin-foil hat and get some sleep? 
