It is now trivial to check how many posts many people in social media make with their own accounts, and astroturfing campaigns still happen.

Why would social media companies fight against this? They, much like the public actually like the engagement. That is the whole problem.

Look at X, where you can now see where people are posting from, do people honestly engage with the feature? No, they don't bother to check if they agree with the content and they use it as an excuse to dismiss in bad faith if they don't like the content.

This is not a control problem, social media networks are not at a loss of options in how to engage with this, they don't want to, the point can be made that states might want to fix this and are unable to, but if that was actually the case there's half a dozen better ways to do that, among them, banning the services.

The idea that the entirety of the population ought to throw privacy away so people can still browse Instagram is repugnant to me.

Let's say the government issues hundreds of thousands of IDs to people who don't exist and uses them to verify bots (or room full of paid humans) that post pro-government messages all day, at "normal" rates that a human posts.

It's amazing how there is a much larger crowd, of completely real people, who approve of the government, than those nasty dissenters. We know they're real people because we trust the government vouching for its own IDs.

And because of the real ID policy, the government can also ask the social media company for the ID used by opposed posters, and find out where they live and "visit" them, maybe "warn" them.

Hooray for democracy!