As others have pointed out, such algorithms written by amateurs have been demonstrated to work.

You also assume people are meticulous in taking precautions and never make mistakes. People whose access to information is restricted (such as by the great firewall of china) won't even know stylometry exists.

Even if it doesn't identify all cases, the chilling effect is enough.

Authoritarians are not known for their attention to false positive rates.

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You didn't even try to address that dissent will be identified before it reaches a sufficiently conscious and intentional level to even consider taking precautions.

Most people don't have alts for normal usage and tying an account to IP to real person is easy for the government. The only difficulty is identifying opponents at scale.

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Finally, please don't dismiss arguments by employing the "sufficiently snarky comment" technique.

The biggest danger of AI isn't that it will revolt but that it'll allow dictators and other totalitarians complete control over the population.

And I mean total. A sufficiently advanced algorithm will be able to find everything a person has ever posted online (by cross referencing, writing style, etc.) and determine their views and opinions with high accuracy. It'll be able to extrapolate the evolution of a person's opinions.

The government will be able to target dissidents even before they realize they are dissidents, let alone before they have time to organize.

Unfortunately that is way outside too many people's Overton window. And, also unfortunately, I don't think the average human is sufficiently intelligent to understand why he should care.[note 1]

Throughout history, we see cycles of freedom and oppression, separated by either collapse or revolt.

- Collapse happens when anti-socials gain so much power in an organization (whether it's a corporation or state) that it starts to function so poorly that it's overtaken by competitors (or even destroys itself).

- Revolt happens when they gain/use that power too blatantly and people notice. Peaceful revolt is possible on the surface but ultimately, all true power is backed by violence - sometimes that violence is just thinly veiled behind multiple steps of action and reaction (unarmed protesters attacked by police will bring rocks and Molotovs next time which will cause even more attacks from the police which might escalate into civil war).

But right now we're at a point where oppressors have enough history to learn from. They don't care about collapse and revolt only happens when people are willing to act. So what they're doing right now is conditioning everyone that violence is wrong. This comes in many forms: bans on social media (every TOS forbids promoting violence these days), forced self-censorship (just watch a couple youtube shorts, good luck finding one where "kill" isn't spelled "k*ll" and bleeped out), zero-tolerance policies (school will punish both aggressor and target when they get into a fight), ...

Trump is a fascist (https://acoup.blog/2024/10/25/new-acquisitions-1933-and-the-...). Last time people like him got into power in the civilized world, one was shot and hung upside down from a gas station, the other killed himself in a bunker. But this time when people reached for the 4th box of liberty, they were almost universally shunned. So he got into power, elected by the stupid people, and to nobody's surprise immediately started dismantling the system which exists to keep him in check.

He will do it slowly enough that each time he takes a step towards his goal, he will only piss off a small portion of the people and there will never be enough organized opposition at once. At least this time the dictator-elect is so old he might snuff it from natural causes before he does too much damage.

But the average person will not learn from it. The idea that a group of people as large as tens or hundreds of millions needs one special individual at the top is the peak of human stupidity.

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[note 1]: Some people see this as too arrogant to be said openly but them it becomes just an excuse for them to shut down their logical faculties and reject what I say based on primitive instincts, proving my point.

- Anyway, look at how many democracies use the plurality/FPTP voting system which is known to be pretty much the worst possible (https://rangevoting.org/).

- Look at how many people in the west will say that democracy is obviously good and dictatorship obviously bad but don't question why nearly all corporations have hierarchical (dictatorial) power structures.

- Look at how many people are OK with spending a third or half of their salary on rent, which is just free money that goes to people who contribute nothing to society.

- Look at how many people are unable to differentiate between morality (what is right) vs legality (what the state will penalize you for) and how even the language is warped to mix them (people saying "I did nothing wrong" when they are talking about breaking the rules, whether they are laws or whatever screed a subreddit mod came up with).

Exactly. It's an evolutionarily beneficial trait. We're no longer competing with other species (why social traits developed), we're competing against each other (where the right amount of anti-social traits works best).

He's first and foremost a narcissist (strongly grandiose subtype, and all over the place on the communal/malignant axis).

That condition should make him ineligible for any position of power. This is what a society gets when it elects someone mentally ill (in the harmful-to-others rather than the typical harmful-to-ill-person sense).

I am continually astounded by how many people, even if you explain the symptoms to them, will be unable to see it - not just in this one case but in general. There is something in many people that makes them attracted to those who treat them awfully and consider them only slightly above things.