Link EU digital ID wallet to social media accounts to end anonymity: Spanish PM

Social media accounts held in the European Union should be linked to EU Digital Identity Wallets to prevent anonymity, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez told an audience at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

Sánchez presented social media as a promising set of platforms that fulfilled some of their early promise, but ultimately have led to greater concentration of wealth and power and a range of harms to society. These negative effects were brought in through the algorithms that determine what people see on each platform, which he compares to the Trojan Horse with raiders hiding concealed within.

Rigour is replaced with immediacy when social dialogues move from newspapers and coffee shops to outlets that limit messages to a few hundred characters, or 30 seconds of video, Sánchez argues.

Despite this, he believes social media is too important to society at this point to abandon it entirely.

To improve the situation, he proposes ending anonymity on social media, comparing anonymous posting with driving a car without carrying a license. It provides impunity for the worst actors, while making space for the plague of bots.

Every user account should be connected to a EUDI Wallet, though the user could post under a pseudonym or nickname.

He also notes that this measure could help prevent children from accessing inappropriate or dangerous content.

The Age Verification Providers Association (AVPA) said in comments on the Digital Services Act (DSA) last year that the EUDI Wallet is not designed for age assurance, but part of the reason for that is the anonymity that most stakeholders want to accompany age checks for accessing age-restricted goods and services.

European data protection authorities like France’s CNIL have called for age assurance methods to be tokenized, and therefore “double-blind.” That is the opposite approach to that proposed by Sánchez for social media. Spain’s AEPD suggested age assurance be carried out at the device level.

Algorithmic transparency and more accountability

The algorithms must be shared with authorities to increase transparency. Digital Services Act must be enforced. And the platform owners must be held accountable for compliance failures.

“The owner of a small restaurant is responsible if their food poisons customers; social media tycoons should be held responsible if their algorithms poison our society,” Sánchez says.

The biggest fine ever imposed by the EU on a tech company amounted to 0.6 percent of its annual profits, he notes.

Article Topics

age verification  |  digital identity  |  EU Digital Identity Wallet  |  identity verification  |  social media  |  World Economic Forum