Social networks such as Facebook and Twitter are the main platforms for people to share their political thoughts. 

Unfortunately, the same platforms are intentionally misused by corrupted groups - trolls, to cause political polarisation and disagreement. Trolls have affected freedom of speech in many countries by spreading fake news. Trolls involvement has been detected in the USA elections, Brexit, and even now, during the war in Ukraine trolls are actively spreading fake news.

Facebook and Twitter declare that they are working on different algorithms and AI tools to detect trolls. But after a troll has shared fake news, it is already late to expose it. Troll has already done its job, and after deletion new one will emerge.

For building trust among the users, an optional photo verification successfully has been used on various social platforms, like dating apps. With current technology, photo verification does not require government ID cards.  

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An extract from Tinder solution:

How does Photo Verification work?

Photo verification has two steps: Pose verification and face verification. 

Pose verification extracts pose geometries from your selfie photo using computer vision technology, and determine whether the pose geometry matches the requested one. 

Face verification detects your face in your selfie and your profile photos and extracts facial geometries using facial recognition technology. If your selfie matches your profile pictures - you’re the same person as your profile photos. 

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In the world of trolls, we, as ordinary users, have a right to identify ourselves as real ones and be accountable for the word we spread on social media. And as a real person, I would like to identify other real persons to decide - whom I trust.

I want to underline that we are not requesting to force users any kind of verification, but having an option - to self-photo verify and to self declare as a real person, hence have more trust from others to yourself and seek the same.

We hope the recent acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk will change it for the better and hope our word will reach him as feedback from Twitter users. 

Reference articles:

• Trolls Continue To Be A Problem On Social Media
• Troll farms reached 140 million Americans a month on Facebook before 2020 election, internal report shows
• Trolls and traffickers target Facebook group for Ukrainian refugees
• Twitter has admitted Russian trolls targeted the Brexit vote (a little bit)
• How does Photo Verification work?