"Authenticaing real humans” is not the same as "identity verification”. It’s clear his primary goal is not mass identity verification, instead identity verification is his means for removing spam. Don’t get me wrong: the ends don’t justify the means. However, I think it’s important to make that subtle distinction to clarify to people that we don’t need to misrepresent over here.

I go with the assumption that Elon is controlled opposition. He has significant influence, and even if at the surface his intention may not seem bad, I can't help but feel something weird is up with that guy. Word on the street is that X is supposed to become the western WeChat. "Oh you posted something the government doesn't like? You can't use your Tesla for a week" "If we want to beat China we have to become China" mentality. These changes happen in slow increments, often disguised as positive changes.

Coping much? He is actively as we speak authenticating real humans via identity verification. No amount of mental gymnastics will square that circle. Also, pretty sure the bot problem was just an excuse to implement identity verification. He could have simply required payment with no KYC/ID requirements to mitigate bot spamming.

I don’t think requiring payments fully fixes the bot problems. With more sophisticated AI there will be increasingly bots that are able to profitably able to spam these platforms even if they have to pay for it. Anyway, I’m not trying to protect Elon and I’m all in on nostr, I just think that if our hypothesis is right, we will not have to fight them with their own populist and attention seeking weapons, in fact it will be counterproductive.

We agree there, that’s why I said requiring payment mitigates the problem. It’s not about fighting twitter. Odell and many others are just pointing out how what Twitter and many other social media platforms are doing leads down a dark path.