totally agree, cyber-bullying is mostly due to anonymity, and technology is well developed, and hackers find their way to do heinous acts and hide behind, this type of abuse cannot simply be prevented by banning social media, the cause is deep within the society's roots.
The actual solution is to limit your social media use unless you want to be subject to abuse.
I only have my Facebook for friends to contact me via messenger. As well as it's original purpose, commenting on a ( real life )friend's engagement photos with a nice congrats.
The moment you get into stuff The Facebook wasn't designed for; like actually meeting new people, arguing with strangers, etc , then you run into problems.
I have some very strong personal beliefs regarding how I live my life. I don't need to argue them though. I also have various strong political/ societal beliefs. Again no need to argue them.
Why should you have to shut yourself away from a large section of modern daily life just to not be the subject of abuse? Why is not even an option to work to fix the abuse?
The technology isn’t the problem, it’s us. Our primitive instincts just aren’t compatible to deal with such big groups of other people anonymous or not.
> Why is not even an option to work to fix the abuse?
It is difficult for even human judges to clearly define what counts as abuse and what doesn't. Automated algorithms (or manual reviews) will be much worse, most likely.
I agree. If people lack the emotional intelligence to realise when it is time to stop a conversation ( in real life and on social media), then they are simply being infantile by asking government or tech companies to do it for you. The block/ignore buttons are there for a reason.
Not really on the anonymity front. I worked for an anti bullying children's charity back in the late noughties and we found that online bullying was often a continuation of real life bullying, and that kids who bullied online (and were generally trollish) were the same kids who did it in real life. Anonymity certainly didn't help a lot of the time, but it wasn't the cause.
"Anonymous" social media accounts can be tied back to a real person already a lot of the time. People are terrible about "doxing" themselves in places where pseudonyms are used. (Usually that's fine, since nobody is really out to get them and the sleuthing takes work.)
In the case of certain governments, the account owner is likely identifiable near 100% of the time, with not much effort.
Depending on what social media we're talking about, (and what corporations,) there may be corporations assembling pseudonym to identity mappings, too.
Making a law that forbids anonymity does help authoritarians, but it's mostly formalizing what is already an unspoken rule: that you can't truly be anonymous online. Other parties can throw away knowledge of you, like logless VPNs or TOR, but its next to impossible to verify they really do that.
4chan and the MSM are both despicable slime pits in their own ways, but 4chan is much more honest. If the corporate media decides some subject is taboo, or that some line of inquiry is banned in order to protect advertisers' profit, you'll still be able to find extremely strong signal about those topics on 4chan.
Anonymous sites like Blind and 4chan (and other semi-anonymous sites like Twitter and its clones) seem to have the same problem but in reverse, where everything is overloaded with negativity and creates that strong signal, even if it's unwarranted. There is a reason conspiracy theories, misinformation, racism, and other cynical rhetoric tend to spread so well on those sites. I think Twitter and Blind have improved their moderation recently... but 4chan seems to always be the same cesspool.
Yes, I am sure we should be referencing the logic of his proposal, and that we should consider that moot’s implementation of ephemerality on 4chan allowed too much persistence.
It allows for taboo topics which could be the worst if you subscribe society norms.
Remember if everyone was anonymous so would personal traits which forces judging on material and people not taking things personally because their real id isn't attach to this idea
The freedom to do the worst is also the freedom to do the best. That is an unavoidable universal law.
Look at instances where the conversation is forced to respect conventional values.
It's death. Conformity and moronic mob-politics becomes the norm. So norm that you forget that there was anything better. (Reddit and Facebook are 2 notorious cases of this.)
4chan is sharp and smart. And infantile and vile. And sometimes it's hard to tell the difference. Which is only proper.
Well, it can be. But the main boards usually aren't. A lot of smart people have left the platform. What's left is mostly "bad" people who have nowhere else to go: nazis, child molesters, edgy teenagers and so on.
Offended no, it's hard to take it that serious. But yes, I do disagree with blatant racism and child sexual abuse. And I don't think it's particularly witty or edgy even.
>Our greatest artists and thinkers have been condemned throughout history.
Our greatest artists and thinkers were typically not nazis or child molesters.
I don’t know… my Nextdoor group is pretty abusive to certain groups at times, and people post happily with their real life name and the rough area of where they live attached. Hate towards an individual person isn’t super common, but it happens. If this extrapolates, I can’t see removing anonymity doing much other than e.g. hurting LGBT groups online (imagine asking questions as a member of that group in a conservative community and forced to use your real name)
> I can’t see removing anonymity doing much other than e.g. hurting LGBT groups online (imagine asking questions as a member of that group in a conservative community and forced to use your real name)
Consider that this could be one of the motivations behind the push for things like this.
Why would it matter if it's a government if it's public? Also, yes, definitely. Hungary and Poland on the extreme end to start with but really all of the Catholic and Orthodox countries to some degree not to mention some US states and rural areas even in northern Europe...
Nextdoor has had enormous racism/bigotry problems. They have had to revamp a variety of their interfaces to minimize this problem. It's like they have to do A/B testing to minimize it. Real identity doesn't do anything to slow down the oblivious.
I think you are overstating your case, and I question the motivations for doing so. The vast majority of people with either the 2R or 3R allele have not committed any criminal acts, and in fact the 3R allele is heavily associated to the type of risk taking behavior that is often rewarded in society. There may be a correlation between those who end up committing criminal acts and their gene expression, but it alone is not a causative factor and it's completely unsupported by evidence to make such a claim. Stronger causative factors are environmental, such as poverty, which has a direct causative relationship with criminal behavior.
The obvious factor behind this discrepancy is the distribution of resources in the real world, as well as the fact that organized violent drug crime is mostly operated out of black communities (again: poverty).
This allele you've identified as the genetic reason for white superiority is most common among Asian men.
>Nextdoor has had enormous racism/bigotry problems.
Could you provide some concrete examples? I've used Nextdoor regularly in three major US metropolitan areas, and I have yet to see anything like an "enormous racism/bigotry problem." If anything, I see sanctimonious neighbors calling each other racist at the drop of a hat.
Nextdoor is a really interesting case because it limits the conversation to people in your immediate neighborhood.
Because of that, it creates an inherent ingroup/outgroup dynamic that doesn’t exist on most social media. In other systems, you have to create that through some kind of signaling.
As a result, that dynamic overwhelms other topics.
The article cites the recent murder of politician David Amess as the purpose for revisiting discussions about banning anonymity on social networks.
But Amess was stabbed to death by a Somali migrant with ‘religious and ideological motivations’. What does that have to do with social media anonymity?
>While police are investigating whether there are any links to Islamist extremism and have not connected the killing to the targeting of MPs online, allies of Amess said he had voiced growing concern about threats and toxicity within public discourse as they demanded a crackdown.
>Francois, the MP for Rayleigh and Wickford, which neighbours Amess’s Southend West constituency, added: “I suggest that if we want to ensure that our colleague didn’t die in vain, we collectively all of us pick up the baton, regardless of our party and take the forthcoming online harms bill and toughen it up markedly.
So there is absolutely no link between his murder and seemingly any online activity, but they're still going to use his murder to to justify... harsher punishment for being mean to government employees online? Never let a crisis go to waste I guess.
> So there is absolutely no link between his murder and seemingly any online activity, but they're still going to use his murder to to justify... harsher punishment for being mean to government employees online? Never let a crisis go to waste I guess.
This is long lost fight, anonymity in the UK because under the banner of racism the vast majority of them want to get rid of it and footballers who rally it are very influential. It's just a matter of time.
Its offensive to me that if a white guy had stabbed anyone left of center, headlines would gleefully have rushed to announce far right/white supremacist terrorism, even prematurely; but when a white christian politician is targeted by a muslim immigrant, in a fucking church no less, not only do you not see "terrorism" in any headline, the vast majority of outlets fail to even describe the attacker beyond age and sex. Especially British publications.
I had suspected that it was a minority specifically because of the cryptic reporting of the incident, and it turns out you're right, now that a handful of US/international outlets have been willing to provide details.
And this article is part of a pattern of deflection. I watch Al Jazeera and they had the gall to interview three different minority MPs and heavily imply that minorities are being targeted.
This collective demonization of a global minority by western outlets, together with the gaslighting that whites (and especially white christians) aren't being targeted, is not going to end well. If you want to argue that its a deserved comeuppance that's one thing, but the way that these outlets implicitly collude to protect the identity of minority, and only minority attackers, is underhanded and dishonest.
Anonymous people online might use this murder as an argument for limiting immigration. "As horrific as this tragedy was, if our diversity becomes a casualty, I think that's worse."
Nothing. There's a very common pattern you see in political responses to outrages and tragedies which is:
Something terrible has happened.
Something must be done.
X is something.
Therefore X must be done.
It doesn't actually matter what X is, the important thing for the government is to be seen to be doing something. In reality the calls by UK politicians to end online anonymity will fizzle out in a few weeks once the media cycle moves on, as it's not something they can really do without spending an immense amount of time, money and political capital. In the mean time there will be a flurry of articles like this one rehashing debates that have been going on ever since the first troll posted the first comment on a BBS.
More often X is something the existing authoritarians want so the solution to basically anything immediately jumps to the already proposed and planned X. The event is just the excuse and the details irrelevant.
Same here. Besides, what I type here today may not be controversial at all, but who knows how activists will change what society sees as acceptable vs problematic? All it would take is one motivated activist to dig through my comment history and find something to get me cancelled in the future.
"Enterprise software is totally fucked and working on it sucks, and b2b sales people are lying sociopaths. I just want to make more money with less effort and don't care about half-baked mission statements"
If I weren't anonymous this could make me unemployable
Anonymity is important because it allows you to have discussions purely based on the arguments and opinions, without the bias of who youre talking to.
I often find myself having a wonderfully deep discussion with someone online, and when I eventually find out what they look like (etc), I often realize that they dont look as friendly, educated, etc as they are.
Humans are really bad at this, and you will put people into groups in your mind no matter how hard you try. Anonymity mostly removes this bias, and leads to real and pure equal exchange of ideas.
but it also has a dark side that you can pretend to have deep and meaningful discussion and push your agenda and abuse naive person on the other side of conversation.
I just discussed this with a bunch of my friends. If you're having a high level technical exchange with somebody that you don't know, then you find out that that other person is a female, you're really impressed, that a girl will be that good at this very technical topic.
If, OTOH, you find out that that other person is a black guy (assuming you're white), you go through one of two reactions: If you're opinion of blacks is low, then you're really impressed. If you don't particularly like blacks (read: racist), then you're disappointed, and slightly pissed off - that that other guy knows more than you do, or know so much about a very technical topic, when he belongs to a group that you've been told are not very bright.
Humans are interesting creatures in this regards. That's why the right to remain anonymous online should be a given.
My reaction is to say that people should have the choice of being either (1)anonymous or (2)nasty when on-line. Not both. (Non-anonymous and nice obviously being allowed.)
Too bad that seems impossible to effectively implement at scale.
> Too bad that seems impossible to effectively implement at scale
That is the problem. It's an unsolvable problem for the near+ future - unless we shift so much power from the public to the powerful that they can silence the public on a whim.
> Too bad that seems impossible to effectively implement at scale.
There are technical solutions to this. The old one was called hashcash, which a predecessor to cryptocurrency.
To get an account you would have to do something like $5 in electricity worth of computation one time, which you can do without giving anyone your name. But then if you do something foolish and get banned, it'll cost you another $5 (or however much is necessary to provide a sufficient deterrent) to get a new account.
Obviously now you could just have them pay (or mine for you) a small amount of cryptocurrency, which would then go to offset the cost of banning the spammers who still try their luck.
This just seems like punishing the poor, very much like fines for speeding. "Rich" people get the freedom to do and say what they wish, but the poor must sit still and only convey favorable opinions.
Fixed fines always have that issue. Bezos racked up tens (hundreds?) of thousands of dollars in parking tickets in DC while visiting the site of his new house.
> This just seems like punishing the poor, very much like fines for speeding. "Rich" people get the freedom to do and say what they wish, but the poor must sit still and only convey favorable opinions.
It's $5, not $500. Anybody using an account long-term will experience more cost from having it deleted than from paying that amount for a new one.
The reason it works is that a poor person gets to amortize that $5 over the life of the account, typically ten years or more, which makes it a negligible amount even for someone making minimum wage. Whereas the spammer gets banned and needs a new account every 90 seconds.
And if the problem is that your mods are imposing censorship on disadvantaged people, you don't want something that makes that sort of "moderation" effective. But that's a different problem. Maybe try not having such a small number of large platforms so it's easier for people to abandon the ones doing such things.
This seems to say a lot about you but not so much about others. You're saying your default opinion is that women wouldn't be good at a technical topic. And that you believe that white people only have two possible opinions coming in to an encounter with a black person: your opinion could be low, or you could be racist.
Not all people that use this site will have undergone the same sort of intellectual journey into race as those of us in more diverse areas. True tolerance would be to understand that not all people in the HN demographic come from places like the US that are true melting pots. There was no evidence of racist thinking in the OP's remarks, and you don't have to go about suggesting there was to make the point you're attempting to make.
Look, you are clearly chastising an account whose first language is not English, and for not having penned their remarks in a way that would satisfy the crypto-fascist tendencies of the average tech worker living in SF. You can call what he said ignorant on some level if you read into it enough - why would you, is my question? - but the idea that it is harmful is ridiculous. Your remarks and others calling this guy racist are far more harmful than anything he's said so far.
Many of us may be programmers but we should still be able to grok things with more nuance than this.
>you are clearly chastising an account whose first language is not English
Why do you think this? Their spelling and grammar show few obvious mistakes to me, and after reading your comment I looked at their history and they seem to be an American for at least twenty years.
This doesn't describe me at all? I am impressed by someone's understanding of a topic and bring no expectations to the table. Not everyone is fixated on race and gender stereotypes. This is a sad lie being pushed by people who want us to stay divided.
You make a lot of assumptions regarding people you have never met. Why do you discount the white people who don't have the reactions that you presume they all do?
I'm white and a male and I don't share any of these expectations when I interview or speak to folks. I'm further saddened that anyone thinks there's an expectation enough of white people or men that is concrete enough to put it in plaintext like this.
In my head, this is an example of a problem moderation or lack of anonymity won't fix. People have to learn to see this kind of comment for the dud that it is on their own.
> If you're having a high level technical exchange with somebody that you don't know, then you find out that that other person is a female, you're really impressed, that a girl will be that good at this very technical topic.
What nonsense is that? I've never noticed any correlation between gender and technical skills. I mean, I've noticed that there are fewer women in the technical space, but not that their skills are lower.
You then seem to go on to assume all white people are racist against black people. Because both of your examples are racist.
The conversation didn’t start with that. The conversation started with widespread abuse online originating from anonymous accounts.
Communities without abuse problems never even float the idea of banning anonymity. One reason being it’s extremely expensive to do that if not effectively impossible.
Wasn’t there evidence that anonymity doesn’t actually play as big a part as people keep saying? Most of the Twitter abuse, you can generally identify who it is behind the account, it’s more the forum than the anonymity?
It's the Internet. One of the things baked into the Internet is the abuse. It's been there from very early on, and it's never been substantially curbed. Some would probably rank it as a defining characteristic of the Internet. Many communities have grown on the Internet, in which part of what defines the in-group is when and how you're abusive, not whether (of course you are). This isn't a one-off, but a part of what communities grow around over and over again. Facebook and Twitter see tons of it, even when anonymity isn't a factor.
The medium is the message. One of the messages of the Internet, as a medium, is abuse.
Now, whether the take-away is "we should try to regulate it to stop that", or "people should stop using it to post details and thoughts, alongside PII and all tied to one traceable identity, that they wouldn't ever post to the public-use notice board at the local grocery store, because it's fucking insane (as Zuck might put it, they're 'dumb fucks') to post like that on the Internet and expect it to go well", or something else, is a matter for consideration.
> Communities without abuse problems never even float the idea of banning anonymity.
This implies that many communities with anonymity don't face abuse problems, so anonymity is not the root of the problem. Maybe the problem lies in the subject matter that the community handles and the sort of people that attracts.
No it really doesn’t imply that, and I don’t think many people would argue anonymity is “the” root of the problem. It just appears to be a contributing or exacerbating factor.
Of course if you attract only polite people you don’t have abuse problems regardless of anonymity.
Anonymity makes abuse easier. It diminishes the cost to the abuser and places almost all of the cost on the victim. I would also recommend that you not be so quick to push the blame back on 'the community', because when you do so you tend to end up with the gatekeepers for those communities being forced to shoulder the cost and then we end up with twitter bans, Facebook moderation, and a lot of pearl clutching by the online free speech brigade. Most of the general pubic puts up with anonymity, but they certainly do not demand it and if it becomes too costly or too toxic they seem happy to chuck it overboard.
I don't blame the community but the subject. People on car repair fora are perfectly civil to each other; people discussing politics become barbarians toward each other. Take two people from the car repair forum and have them hash out politics, and watch them turn into savages. It's the subject matter.
The stake are higher in political discussion, but you do not have to search long to find uncivil behavior in just about any online interaction. People in a car repair forum might be kind to each other, but put those same two into a sports discussion, or even a discussion of Ford v Chevy and things can get quite salty quite quickly.
Then don't use those platforms? If you need a community that is going to be prone to abuse problems then make your own platform. Politicians and government offices should know better than to be using a commercial social media as their primary platform especially when it's not even based in your own country.
This is troubling logic if we expand it to other areas. For example, what if someone says "Let's ban killing other people"? Is it enough to point out that sometimes killing people saves the lives of other people? Should we outlaw killing in self defense? Should we outlaw killing people who are an imminent threat like active shooters?
If you agree that sometimes killing can be justified, does that mean we need to allow all murder? Obviously not. These issues have nuance. There are always pros and cons. So I will repeat majormajor's point, the mere existence of a pro is not enough of an argument.
The conversation (from the MP quoted in the article) started with those cons, so the pros were the necessary response. Our agreement on your point might have been more evident had I been less terse.
I agree with that. My concern, and what I assume is the concern of others, is that those putting these regulations in place would have neither the knowledge or intentions to consider that nuance. Considering that nuance myself, I don't think I could properly implement such laws.
That's true. On the other hand, "The pros and cons of such a law are so mixed as to make a good one impossible," is a good reason not to make such a law. I think many of us see any law that could be described as "banning anonymous accounts" as being written with too broad a nib to be useful.
"No rule is better than bad rule" may be closer to my argument, though it dips further into anarchy than I'd like. People are welcome to try as they like, but governments aren't people. If Facebook wanted to try some system like Parler had I wouldn't protest against it, but the UK government mandating it would have far more reach and requires more consideration as a result.
Being attacked and/or killed is almost never voluntary. Viewing anonymous posts on the internet is almost always voluntary. Whatever damage is caused is emergent from the framework of interpretations of the individual. This is closer kin to victimless crime as opposed to real crime than it is conditional rules of engagement. I'm under the impression you're engaging in sophistry though, "This is troubling logic if we expand it to other areas." You're correct, a square peg does not fit in the round hole. And you've also failed to negate the myriad arguments favoring continued anonymity with any salient cons, but have instead erected a strawman.
>Viewing anonymous posts on the internet is almost always voluntary.
No it isn't. Social media is a near required part of modern life for a lot of people, especially those in the public sphere. For example, it is near impossible to be a freelance journalist without a social media account. Once you have that account, people are free to push their anonymous posts to you.
>This is closer kin to victimless crime as opposed to real crime than it is conditional rules of engagement.
This is just a baffling comment and shows you are out of touch with the type of abuse we are talking about. I can't imagine you have seen any of this first hand if you think this is "close kin to victimless crime". There are very much victims on the end of this abuse.
You literally just indicated that anonymity is important. Freelancers could publish under a pseudonym - a form of anonymity to protect themselves from the public.
And I mean, there was that one time that some dude, in person at a press conference threw a shoe at George W. Bush, the President of the United States of America, he wasn't anonymous, and what level of force could've been deployed as recourse ran up to death, evidently not adequate disincentive.
I can make a victim out of myself by a few alterations in my personal narrative. I choose not to.
This is classic victim blaming. It is the fault of the person being abused for either not being preemptively anonymous or for "choosing" to allow doxing, death threats, and the like being part of their "personal narrative"?
People spread harmful lies better when they aren't banned from doing so and when the harm they do is attached to a pseudonym not their actual life.
It is vastly harder to exclude people spreading harmful lies when they can do it under 27 trivially created and then discarded identities across 12 platform.
It's trivial to argue that people agree to engage with online communities as they agree to engage in in person communities but what is the realistic alternative? Both huddle in your basement AND don't engage online either?
It is unrealistic when your online life is a large part of people's gateway to communication and culture. People deserve to be able to engage in such without also expecting harm.
Furthermore people's online hate touches people's lives with or without their opting for engagement when the festering hate nurtured online gives birth to real world violence, mass murder, coup, collapse of civil society.
It seems trivially true that anonymity enables hate and I support both people's right to voice unpopular but not harmful ideas and consequences for those who call for hate and violence.
You may note my username is simply a plain old name and it's my real name. I cannot any longer support anonymity save for cases where safety demand it.
> People spread harmful lies better when they aren't banned from doing so and when the harm they do is attached to a pseudonym not their actual life.
Do they? To me it seems that people demand credentials in most cases to merit trust from an unknown. I certainly don't hop on 4chan and assume literal factual information is being doled out in every post. Nor on Twitter, nor Fecebook. I might backtest whatever they're proposing, but remain skeptical until I've seen it with my own eyes. And in any case if we look into the annals of history, this is blatantly false, there are reams of examples of people lying in plain sight. Tyrants and demagogues, kings and courts, basically every politician, corporations, and just regular people. Of course we've always had the issue of "determination of truth", history to the victor and such.
>It is vastly harder to exclude people spreading harmful lies when they can do it under 27 trivially created and then discarded identities across 12 platform.
Let's assume we've actually objectively determined the truth: what happens when the liars are let free? They're running around screaming 1+1=3, how is it that they're going to intuited by everyone else? I suspect, as idiots. Naive interventionism in this case turns them into a divided minority instead of an integrated (and stupid) extremity. Upon being separated they go off and get more and more wild, 1+1=5, 10, 0... Their bonds grow in strength because they're made a separate minority, and far less likely to cease their stupidity.
>It's trivial to argue that people agree to engage with online communities as they agree to engage in in person communities but what is the realistic alternative? Both huddle in your basement AND don't engage online either?
For one, I'm not saying that everything everywhere had ought to have the facilities of anonymity, but that instituting a mode of state coercion blanketing every site on the internet is plainly a hazard. But this line is non-sequitur anyways, we're talking about anonymity in social media not in-person interaction.
>It is unrealistic when your online life is a large part of people's gateway to communication and culture. People deserve to be able to engage in such without also expecting harm.
How do you define harm? Here's a salient conundrum: a guy asks a girl out, she tells him she's not interested. Or the obverse, however you like it. In either case they're very likely emotionally wounded. Then what? What do we take from this?
>Furthermore people's online hate touches people's lives with or without their opting for engagement when the festering hate nurtured online gives birth to real world violence, mass murder, coup, collapse of civil society.
The Nazis did this, the Khmer Rogue did this, the Bolsheviks did this all in plain sight. Millions dead in their wake. Violence was often a means to a better end - depending on perspective. The Hellenic empire was established through warfare, Alexander has been intuited as a great unifier, bringing together a vast and highly integrated culture made of many diverse cultures. The French revolution was a supermassive turning point, and largely lead us to be where we are today, but it was extremely violent. The USA was founded after a revolutionary war. The concern is wanton violence, which in any case is rare, and I suspect anonymity on the internet has little to contribute to it overall, despite the narratives espoused by many.
Civil society is free discourse, but we've long been eroding it.
>It seems trivially true that anonymity enables hate and I support both people's right to voice unpopular but not harmful ideas and consequences for those who call for hate and violence.
If we adopt the relativistic standpoint, every opinion is harmful to someone. Utilitarianism is flawed, not everyone can be happy, even negative utilitarianism is flawed.
It's incredibly unsettling that discussions like these seem to be fought tooth and nail on the internet of all places in this day and age.
It seems like we would never have gotten this far if it wasn't for the kind of interactions you are defending and yet you are entangled in a debate with someone who likely grew up in a society where this approach to interaction was championed throughout their life who is simultaneously insisting that it's more harm than good.
More unsettling is the fact that when I read the sentence:
>How do you define harm? Here's a salient conundrum: a guy asks a girl out, she tells him she's not interested. Or the obverse, however you like it. In either case they're very likely emotionally wounded. Then what? What do we take from this?
I began to wonder whether if I said that in public I would end up in a lot of trouble and possibly fired for daring to suggest that being rejected could hurt the feelings of the person being rejected in an equally valid way as it may make the person being asked out feel uneasy.
I eagerly await the day when I do not constantly feel terrorized by the threat of becoming socially outcast for saying something which should be entirely benign but which has become taboo.
>You may note my username is simply a plain old name and it's my real name. I cannot any longer support anonymity save for cases where safety demand it.
Please ask yourself how you would feel if this site did that -- or even, in fact, if HN didn't actually make anon accounts (without even requiring an email confirmation) so easy that it's an incredibly common occurrence.
One of the things I like about HN is that while anonymity is certainly possible having an identity which is known to the community (whether that be one's actual identity, or in my case a pseudonymous one), allows us to build (and/or repudiate/destroy, as we choose) credibility and engage in discussions over time.
I will say that 'nobody9999' is not the name on my passport, nor is it the name I use with my bank or (when I actually used such things) social media accounts.
However, a search through HN's archives will, nonetheless, provide a history of my comments and submissions.
Should I turn into a raving asshole, the admins/moderators can sanction/ban me without ever knowing my 'legal' name.
That makes a lot more sense than forcing folks to tie their legal identities to everything they do online.
>It's enough to convince vulnerable people who are calling out the misdeeds of the powerful.
Vulnerable people like the trans community that is often the victim in this type of anonymous social media abuse? Are they allowed to call out the powerful and disproportionately white straight cis men who control social media companies and allow this abuse to continue?
I just find it funny that you are using an argument that is identical to the one used by some of the people you are arguing against.
You know... I'm starting to think you are correct to be entirely honest. If anonimity is banned we can actually see who is part of those twitter cancel mobs and actually fine and imprison those harassing other people and send death threats.
50% /s
I'm 100% against it tbh. There are people that would be dead without it(just in case anyone missed the sarcasm)
There is nothing other than anonymity than can provide the pro put forth by the OP. On the other hand, the "cons," you are making non-specific reference towards are achievable by any number of strategies and are a common facet of everyday life.
I'm upvoting you because I think you make a good argument, using sarcasm, for anonymity. If you were indeed serious, please let me know, and I'll remove the upvote. Thanks.
>my favorite part about non-anonymous accounts is being able to find their employer if they say something that's annoying.
An excellent (sarcasm registered and understood, BTW) point.
I am a practitioner of BDSM[0], which is, in some circles, quite controversial.
Despite the fact that my activities are always consensual and never cause harm to anyone, if my employer, clients or others with whom I have unrelated interactions with had negative ideas about such things, I could suffer serious repercussions.
I generally don't discuss such things online (or offline, if those I'm around aren't trusted), but if I did (as I am now), forcing me to link those discussions with my "legal" identity, could inflict real damage on my life -- even though nothing that I do is illegal or harmful.
As such, Vangelis is 100% correct. My private activities, unrelated to my work, are none of my employer's (or anyone else's) business, nor is it a danger/threat to anyone. If I didn't have the veil of pseudonymity here, I would never even hint at it.
What's wrong with just allowing users to mute/ignore others?
Instead of banning anonymity (which is a ridiculous thing to do), platforms can provide better tools to allow users to curate content or join discussion rooms.
If you want some type of troll blocker to prevent spam accounts, you can use an anonymous crypto in junction with sign-up for a small fee that is inconsequential to a single user but painful at scale for users that generate many accounts.
As someone who was a long time user of 4chan and that believed this once before, I now adamantly disagree that total anonymity leads to better discussion and believe that 4chan and the like are ultimately failed experiments.
With total anonymity you end up with trolls or people who are just seriously misinformed arguing vigorously.
You can spend the time and present arguments to possibly convince an actual reasonable person. It gets tiresome over time posting the same basic information. Most of the boards on there end up with a good baseline of information for their topics over years, but for anyone slightly knowledgeable it is tiresome to move topics to that eventual baseline and especially to move them past it. That same information can usually be collected from less toxic sources in a few months as opposed to years that the collective takes.
Every once in a while you'll get a fresh expert that hasn't gotten tired of posting the same information, but I stopped years ago bothering to share any information I had. It's always an up hill battle and the posts will be gone in a few hours or, at best, days
But trolls end up dominating. If you waste your time writing informed sourced posts about anything (slavery is bad, the Holocaust happened, Earth isn't flat, etc) all that will happen is the person will eventually just criticize basic grammar mistakes, insult you, and post the same garbage in a new thread.
If you make the mistake of arguing with organized trolls, you'll get link bombed with shit sources and barely tangentially related long sources that suck up your time before you realize that they don't present any facts that are actually relevant to the discussion.
Even 4chan knows this. The business board has measures in place to inform readers when a poster is the same person.
Real names are not needed online to have good discussion. But it's absolutely needed for posters to have repercussions for past posts. True anonymity leads to shallow discussion and trolls.
Associate anonymous posts with an optional pubkey signing. Have tooling that can filter out bad actor signatures and highlight the ones you care about.
Have your interest graph and peer graph suggest new public keys to follow.
I'm not aware of any platforms, blogs or other internet entities (accepting public comments) that chose this system. I'm thinking there are reasons for that choice.
The reason is that it's a technically difficult problem, and thus requires investment to solve (and the most profitable/successful platforms don't want to reduce the amount of information they have about their users).
Fortunately there is work being done in this area by Free Software projects. In particular, the Matrix team are trying to implement a decentralised reputation system[0] and there's no reason this couldn't be applied to the Fediverse too.
Secure Scuttlebutt does exactly this. It is supper effective, and the only social network that I participate in, except for HN.
It's effective because you follow the profiles that you find interesting, when a profile becomes abusive you simply block them from being replicated by your machine. Folks can have as many profiles/feeds as they like, so you can separate out portions of your life that others might find distasteful, or boring.
Well, you name quite the case, but besides that. I think the fact that anonymous discussions derail easier and don't exactly get the best out of people, isn't relevant at all. I would even say, it is a price, we should be willing to pay.
First of all being anonymous is important if you want to call out far more powerful entities than you, which can lash out to you.
Second I think it is important to see, what the darker side of society thinks. Even if you remove them from the normal internet, they will still find a way to communicate, but now it is no longer out in the open. It is better to know then to not know.
4chan's failure to me has little to do with perceived anonymity, and a lot more to do with the culture of an online community, what is tolerated within that community, where the red lines are, and how this is enforced. And "gamification" plays a role, i.e. virtual online points of some sort, be it "likes", be it "karma", be it "upvotes".
Compare 4chan to HN, which is also open to anybody like 4chan, allows anonymous (or rather pseudonymous) posting, and has a somewhat sizeable community of people posting and many more "lurkers" just reading.
Unlike 4chan however, HN does a reasonable job - in my opinion - of being clear what is allowed and what is not, enforces these community standards quite vigorously most of the time, through moderation not just by moderators but the community (flagging), and generally stops outright abuse and harassment, and more often than not stops trolls and people accidentally starting flame wars. That has to be balanced against not over-banning/over-flagging content, which happens, too. Not everything is perfect in the niche that is HN - nothing ever is - but the contrast to 4chan is quite stark, even to the supposedly more moderate and "sfw" 4chan boards like /g/ (technology).
Gamification is a double edged sword. On one hand, it may encourage people to instead of their actual views post quick quips or hide their true opinions and opt instead to just say what they believe the community wants to hear. On the other hand, in places like 4chan which lack such gamification, you don't have to fear burning your reputation as nobody has a visible reputation, which may encourage people to cross lines as there is no way for the community to sanction such behavior.
4chan is also just a bad demonstration of how anonymous culture functions, too. It's become such a pop-culture hotspot that not a single board is really 'usable' like they were in 2012 ("I think I'll check /t/ for $NEW_MOVIE"). However, as you start to branch out into other imageboards, this lack of identity really helps drive the discussions. When you completely remove the upvotes, downvotes, score-based comment ordering and profiles, people are less interested in petty, pyhrric victories. IRC is also another great place where people are oftentimes more interested in fruitful discussion than saving face.
>which may encourage people to cross lines as there is no way for the community to sanction such behavior.
It's also hard for some people to understand that individuals who hold extreme views and use poor sources/facts could, in fact, be people who actually hold those views. They're not trolls. They're not doing it to get a rise out of you. Sometimes, those people are legitimate in their beliefs, regardless of how ass-backwards they are.
And I don't know why people don't understand that.
4chan is also a poor demonstration because you can't be persistently pseudonymous. It's an imageboard.
Compare that to forums which are based on usernames, where there is usually higher quality discussion because you have a post history and this weeds out the bots and trolls.
Every imageboard besides 4chan functions just fine and has perfectly good discussions on things. You can blame 4chan's moderation and administration for its failure.
I can see the pros and cons of anonymity. However, personally I would delete a lot of my social media accounts if they forced me to disclose my identity. The case of Monika at Stackoverflow suggest you have to be really careful when using your full name, even on reputable sites. Data miners would also absolutely love it and governments are powerless to act on abuse as many of these companies are outside an enforceable jurisdiction.
That doesn't seem to tell the story of Monica Cellio, but be a story written by her. One maddeningly vague, unless I want to start digging through tweets to uncover all the things she is alluding to.
The important part is that Stack Exchange mentioned Monica Celio by name in a press release in a manner that was perceived to be defamatory by Monica. The original disagreement was about the CoC. That disagreement/misunderstanding should have been handled in private, there was no need to throw her under the bus
The more I questioned why we need profile pics or real names, or even usernames online, the more I realized ... we don't. They are just vectors for deanonymizing people across sites.
Will I remember "lionkor" among thousands of other HN posters and think about your previous posts? No. But I can click and see your other posts, if the site lets me have that feature. And more importantly, your REPUTATION tells me how many people have upvoted your content that you produce. That's what's relevant. I could also maybe see how strongly you support certain positions (tags/badges) in your profile. It's the latter (reputations and badges) which can serve as a filter for people to set up if they want to ignore trolls and sybil accounts: https://xkcd.com/810/
Similarly we don't need human-readable URLs, we could do perfectly fine with hashes and no politics about domain names. The domain name system is just a glorified search engine, and URLs are only useful for landing on the homepage of a site ... anything longer becomes increasingly hard to verbally communicate, and if we're doing it non-verbally then we may as well send a non-readable URL (e.g. via a link or QR code or a javascript variable).
What you are talking about is not anonymity, it is identity protection. There are many pre-digital examples of what it could be: witness protection programs, confidentiality of journalist sources etc. They are all established, well regulated and with lots of precedents of analysis of those practices in courts. Full anonymity can and should be banned, but we need to develop some sort of new professional privilege to protect digital identity, where you can speak as Jane Doe, but someone knows who you truly are. Whether it is an independent identity platform, a notary keeping an encryption key, a government agency or anyone else who can be hold accountable, that can be discussed and established not just in a law of a single country, but ideally in an international treaty.
So two points: First you advocate special people should get special protections for being in a special job, I am sure that will work out real well.
Second all of these arguments seem to suggest just letting the government know you identity as some sort of compromise, but what about when it is the government I am trying to avoid, sure someone can dox me, or can tell my employer to fire me, but only the government can arrest me and execute me if they determine I've done something to upset someone powerful enough within the government. Sure the government can eventually track me down with their resources, but anything that makes it harder is better.
I did not say „special people“. The confidentiality privilege applies to the keepers of the information about identity, not to the people who own the identity - that could be anyone.
If some government wants to control what you say online, they will make sure you do not have any anonymity at all, like China does with Uigurs by forcing them to use devices with pre-installed tracking software. Many countries do not have technical capabilities to do so, but this also means that main beneficiaries of anonymity there are radical political and criminal groups rather than ordinary people, which may not even have good access to the Internet.
> Anonymity is important because it allows you to have discussions purely based on the arguments and opinions, without the bias of who youre talking to. I often find myself having a wonderfully deep discussion with someone online, and when I eventually find out what they look like (etc), I often realize that they dont look as friendly, educated, etc as they are.
Yes and no. Anonymity also prompts people to make lots of assumptions about you based on what and how you say things that may not hold and may even distort how the messages are received.
For example, I'm an ethnic minority but if I break from certain aspects of identarian political dogma it is generally assumed that I am White. Women who deviate from a certain line on gender issues are, similarly, often assumed to be male unless they indicate otherwise. On issues where a person's lived experiences stemming from their identity might matter, the assumption of there being a 'default' identity ends up kind of polarizing perspectives and eliding nuances and potential middle-ground on a host of issues.
Put another way, it has been said that "on the internet nobody knows you're a dog." But not everyone defines themselves by their "dogness" to the same extent, nor does being a "dog" mean the same thing to all dogs. But since we assume everyone is a default template until they loudly and proudly fly an identifying marker, the only voices who speak for the dogs will be the doggiest of the doggy, the people whose identity as dogs is the most important thing to them in that moment.
Bringing that back to a concrete example, I remember when I first made the switch from Windows to Macintosh in the early aughts (in the peak of the Switch ad era). Initially making the switch was kind of a revelation. I had really just never experienced a computer that was well designed before nor technology that put this much attention towards--what I would later learn to refer to as--UI/UX. I could not stop evangelizing this to everyone who would listen because, to me, it was new and super cool and I was just really really enthusiastic about it. This happened often enough that Apple fanatics online got a reputation for being over-exuberant and kind of deluded. But the thing is, after a few years I just stopped posting about Apple stuff because I had grown into having more balanced and nuanced perspectives on computing. But the assumption in a place like Slashdot back then was that you're a Linux or Windows guy unless you state otherwise. Thus only the newly converted, over-excited Apple fanboys are taken as representative of Mac users and the ones with mellower perspectives are drowned out.
With computing platforms it's all rather frivolous and probably doesn't matter. But when it comes to social or political issues, this dynamic can have real effects on what we think of as an authentically [group] opinion and who gets to speak for whom. I think it has a tendency to foster a certain essentialist way of looking at the world that is rife with ecological fallacies.
> Anonymity is important because it allows you to have discussions purely based on the arguments and opinions, without the bias of who youre talking to.
Unfortunately often we do rely on the other person’s reputation, giving us information as to their possible biases and an initial estimate of their level of competence on the subject matter, in order to assign the appropriate weight to their opinions - especially when it comes to topics outside our scope of expertise.
With anonymity we often put everyone on the same level thus won’t be able to properly weigh varying opinions and filter out opinions that are the least likely to be of value.
>It's ridiculous that bots, trolls, and sockpuppets are given the same esteem and protections as real people.
Agreed. I think any talk of the problems of online anonymity should be focused on bots first and foremost. From my understanding, it's pretty easy to detect like 90% of bot users. Can't we go after those instead? I don't really care that real people online can be mean anonymously, because at the end of the day, it's just one person. But an army of bots? That has a much stronger affect, especially when they all amplify each other's posts and game the algorithms so that they get promoted and seen by more people.
Any talk of the "dangers of online anonymity" that isn't about bots is just a deceptive way of arguing for more online surveillance. This example seems especially egregious, because they're somehow using an MP's murder to push it even though it has literally nothing to do with it.
While banning ~90% of the bots sounds pretty good to me - how long would it take the folks behind those now-banned bots to replace them, with new & "improved" & less easily detected bots?
Of course people will come back with more sophisticated bots, that's inevitable. That happens with everything: bad thing is happening, we figure out how to protect against bad thing, bad people figure out how to get past protection, rinse and repeat.
My point was more that bots are way more harmful than real people online, and any policy on online anonymity intended to "help" people should be focused almost entirely on bots, not people.
Part of a sophisticated bot-banning operation is then trying your damned hardest to make it as hard as possible for the bot itself to detect that it's been detected. Dunno how actually successful those efforts are, but people try!!!
That's unfair. I was in charge of anti-abuse for a dating site with millions of users and my gut reaction was "just 90%?".
The problem with anti-abuse at scale isn't catching the 90-99%. It is the remaining 1%. Have 10M abuse accounts with a 99% success rate and you are left with 100k spam accounts. That, and making sure you aren't catching too many innocent customers in your efforts.
Why is it hard? I have some experience with demographic databases.
I take it as a given that Facebook, NSA, whomever, have uniquely identified every person, living and dead. I just don't understand how or why fake accounts are created.
Smaller outfits like metafilter need some kind of gatekeeper. Like require nominal fee or scan of ID or verification photo.
> I think any talk of the problems of online anonymity should be focused on bots first and foremost. From my understanding, it's pretty easy to detect like 90% of bot users. Can't we go after those instead? I don't really care that real people online can be mean anonymously, because at the end of the day, it's just one person.
Strong disagree in that I think most of the problems people identify with FB are due to the collective actions of mostly real people in conversation.
>To curtail harassment, nerf the outrage machine (algorithmic newsfeeds) and ad revenue biz models.
Speaking only on the money side of this, that is a very easy (and popular) thing to say, but a very difficult thing to do. How would you support these services without the ad revenue business model? Most of the other business models people have tried do not pay the salaries of the network operations people required to run the service.
And I can only imagine that even today people are still going to be reticent to pay for most of the social media services they get online. Most will just wait for another free social media service to come along.
To rid ourselves of ad revenue based business models and algorithms, we need to find, and prove, new business models that work at scale. They don't have to rake in as much money as ads, but they do need to pay for operations and the resultant salaries. And that's not a small amount of money at scale.
Who has a right to profit? Especially when profit comes from harm.
I believe but cannot prove than most targeted advertising is fraudulant. When whistleblowers leak those metrics, this might be a self correcting problem.
Meanwhile...
There are plenty of other ways to run a business.
metafilter, craigslist, ravelery.org, others do well, without harming their users.
> nerf the outrage machine (algorithmic newsfeeds)
Yes, if my feed is composed entire of accounts I follow sorted by date descending, there is little to no opportunity nor incentive for bots to exist at all. Sure, our proverbial crazy uncle is still going to send out conspiracy theories to everyone in his contacts, but this has existed forever and never seemed to cause that much trouble compared to algorithmic newsfeeds.
Even if you include results from followed topics sorted by explicit upvotes, so long as there's none of these inferred engagement metrics used in ranking then the blast radius of a malicious account will be severely limited as it's a lot harder to game explicitly expressed user intent.
Exactly. It would be cool to opt-in and only see other authenticated users. We keep talking about freedom to be anonymous and freedom of speech, but what about my freedom to not use a totally ratfucked web where I cannot trust anybody?
the most abuse I am seeing happening on Twitter originates from blue checks journalists and activists targeting political opponents. Targeting by randoms usually matches IRL statistics - Jews get most abuse, followed by women of all races. No other groups get even close. Also, politicians complaining about online abuse should not have become politicians in the first place.
Not anonymity, but some method to ensure 1 "account" maps to exactly 1 person would go a long way to getting some sanity back.
I don't care what you call yourself, as long as I'm sure you are a singular , real, person.
Somewhat tangential to the article, but here's what I would like: A site like reddit, but you have to get your government ID verified when you sign up.
You can still pick any alias you want, but mods see your location within, say, 100 miles.
Imagine reddit with no bots, banning has consequences, and local subreddits can actually just be people who live there.
The painful sign up flow makes that totally unreasonable, but it would vastly improve my online community experience to live without bots and more limited trolls.
*edit to clarify* -- i don't want them to _have_ my ID, just use some kind of service from stripe or visa or whoever where they get a hash, so that banning is stickier.
I was thinking more of a "verified by stripe" type flow. They just need a location and a hash that prevents multiple signups. I realize that's just moving the problem, but hey the whole idea is impractical anyway.
Isn't this basically what Parler tried to do? They got hacked and the PII of their users was leaked onto the internet and they were derided for collecting so much information.
I suppose, although Parler came at it catering to a very specific and volatile community.
"Don't get hacked and dump PII" is sort of a prerequisite for starting any online business these days, so I don't see that as a huge downside beyond the already comically difficult signup flow. Ideally, ID verification comes from someone like stripe or visa who's core business is handling that data, so the host is only storing a hash and a location.
This doesn't really solve any problems, because it just makes trolling/harassment cost a few bucks. It also practically incentivizes commercial shilling since that has an easy to calculate return.
Any amount of money that would make it cost prohibitive to get banned would also kill the userbase.
As a reddit user for 15 years now I would just move to gab (I think that's the name) or whatever other platform there is if they start asking for government IDs.
As an interesting alternative, imagine that the site asked you to print out a random number on a piece of paper and (within a 2 hour window, for example) film yourself holding it in front of a building or landmark that you claim is within 100 miles of your home.
You could cover your face during the filming, or temporarily affix the paper to some surface, like a tree, and then upload your video clip to a selection of randomly chosen existing members who would cross-reference your location with Google street view, and try to check that the image isn't a deep fake.
Of course people would eventually start offering a paid service of carrying out this process on behalf of the bot farmers, but the algorithm could demand that your filming location not be somewhere that a lot of people have already used for their recordings, which would push up the cost of someone trying to create multiple identities locally to them.
Also, offering this location spoofing service could be classed as (conspiracy to commit) fraud, and the risks of getting caught by going to a specific location at a specific time as part of a sting operation should be pretty high, and not worth being paid minimum wage for.
I don't know why this is such an unpopular idea. For comparison, people have implemented a "Proof of Humanity" system[0] which requires users to record a video of themselves holding up a key-derived number. This is very similar to my idea, except it relies on the uniqueness of faces rather than the cost of visiting a location.
Both ideas seem imperfect, but obviously a system that links your ID to your face is less private than one which links your ID to a circle of radius 100 miles.
It is also interesting to see that the system I linked to uses a "court" system among its members, where people are randomly picked to adjudicate claims about invalid IDs. There is even a system for claiming that a user has died and having their key revoked if they cannot prove they are alive.
Way back in the earliest days of the cypherpunk movement this was one of the things that people thought Chaumian blind signatures were going to offer and one of the crypto techniques that fascinated me the most. These signatures offered a way for a government to issue you an isa-person cert that you could use to sign up for various online services. The thing about this key was that it was like a blinded ecash token, if you double-spent it you could be revealed. If you set up your reddit account with your cert/token then you would get one account, trying to set up a second would trigger a double-spend reveal and your identity would be exposed. You could set up various ways to do blind reveals of specific info (e.g. gender, age, etc) for various types of classification purposes. Stefan Brands pushed this work even further, but it all sort of disappeared during the dot-com bust. Now if you search for 'stefan brands ecash cryptography' google assumes a typo and you get a bunch of links for some shitcoin being pushed by comrade Segal.
A bit of a long and winding road to head off in the direction of noting that some of the old techniques that were being explored in the crypto cambrian explosion of the early 90s are still out there and still have merit. They just seem buried in the back-and-forth jousting between all or nothing when it comes to online identity.
There is one simple, easy way to stop abuse (both online and offline): stop accepting when your peers do it.
There are more people who think abusive behavior is bad than there are abusers who think it's good. If all the people who think it's bad call it out when they see it, avoid people who do it, make a point admonishing people who do it, refuse to accept working with people who do it at work, refuse to socialize with people who do it in social situations, refuse to watch TV shows where it's shown to be funny, refuse to pay to see it at the cinema, and so on then, eventually, it would start to stop.
Literally the only way to stop it is if society as a collective group makes it clear that it's not acceptable.
The definition of abusive behavior is unfortunately ambiguous though. Not everybody agrees to it. That's how you get people claiming folks are too sensitive and other people claiming so and so is an abuser for some more ambiguous circumstance.
That doesn't matter. If everyone just calls out the behavior that they think is abusive then eventually we'll get to a new, lower level of abuse. There'll be some contention where people disagree, but there is already so that doesn't change much.
The first social media site I ever used was Slashdot and back then not only did they allow anonymous accounts but you could impersonate people. Mostly that was used to make jokes (like billg commenting on some Linux news).
Then they added user accounts and a login. Anonymous posting persisted (the famous Anonymous Coward) but impersonating mostly stopped.
The simplest solution here is to require users to present government recognized credentials when signing up for accounts. Users can then create pseudonymous accounts that preserve some notion of anonymity, but when they become abusive the user can then be held accountable in the real world. Any solution here needs to be gated by the courts though, otherwise it would be ripe for abuse in and of itself through doxxing.
I heard a discussion on the radio where a lady was describing the potential use of a third party identity provider for all social media. This would be instead of the government.
If I understood it correctly, the third party would hold your ID etc, and would vouch for you on signup to services. Users would be anonymous/pseudonymous until a warrant was acquired by the police.
A third party would be better IMO than the government. Not sure I like it either way tho. Who is the third party? Breaches would be an issue as the other poster has said. And too much like big brother.
I don't think having a third party instead of government control would be any better because the Snowden leaks showed us that the intelligence agencies will simply secretly co-opt the service to their own ends.
Yes, and I'm surprised that mandatory data retention by ISPs hasn't already gone further down that slippery slope.
Now that people are used to that idea, I expect a government to say "Why don't you store the logs on our computers instead, to save money and be protected with military-grade security. We promise we will still go to the hassle of getting a warrant before reading from the database... Unless of course there's an emergency...".
Perhaps the reason they haven't said this yet is because government cyber-security agencies have already gained real-time unwarranted access to the ISPs' logs. I don't suppose a company could be sued for not correctly securing this data against the government, since the government could hide behind "national security" to block any evidence being admitted in a court case.
Instead of a third party make it shared among multiple third parties such that it requires agreement among N of the third parties to reveal an identity.
Spread the third parties among jurisdictions and make N large enough that no government has enough of the third parties under its jurisdiction to be able to coerce an identity reveal.
I wish people would go back to cutting out letters in a newspaper and gluing them to a bit of paper and sending that. It took thought, effort, and wasn't a spur-of-the-moment thing.
But in all seriousness, there are a lot of women (and men) who have suffered abuse by a partner. Not having anonymous social media accounts ends up being at the very least exclusionary, and at the very worst can lead to physical harm (even murder) by an abusive partner easily tracking someone down.
The other elephant in the room here, is that abusive social media messages have nothing to do with the death of David Amess.
I think society needs an avenue for anonymous self expression. Otherwise people will feel stifled and oppressed by having no outlet to go against cultural norms.
Why does there need to be one uniform solution? Some sites can be entirely anonymous, some can be pseudononymous, some with real names... some heavily moderated, some lightly moderated... some facilitating one on one conversation, some for small groups, some for the wider public... and so on.
The web need not be homogenous. Omegle, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, hacker news... They can all exist differently and that's fine.
Because free discourse cannot be completely stifled by the powers that be if there exists anywhere where people are allowed to express their honest opinions without fear of retribution.
The best thing is don't join social network or unjoin the ones you are on if you find them toxic. if you find a person toxic, almost every social platform has a way of blocking them. i use it all the time. life doesn't have to be stressful.
This is just another example of politicians using a tragedy to push an existing agenda. As noted in the article and in the comments here, most people don't have a problem posting hate under their own names.
Who does like anonymity? Government dissidents. Reporters. Human rights workers and investigators.
Online abuse is much easier to ignore when it's anonymous. What do I care if xX_BonerLord_420_Xx calls me the n-word? It only starts mattering when it's John Johnson, CPA and I have to drive by his house every day.
Faint praise. The article does more to normalize and prime the idea of banning online anonymity with a weak defense than to argue against it. Some abstract principles about discredited freedoms won't stand in the way of progress. The sceptical are not alone.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 298 ms ] threadThat isn't the conclusion of the article at all. No one was proposing banning social media either.
I only have my Facebook for friends to contact me via messenger. As well as it's original purpose, commenting on a ( real life )friend's engagement photos with a nice congrats.
The moment you get into stuff The Facebook wasn't designed for; like actually meeting new people, arguing with strangers, etc , then you run into problems.
I have some very strong personal beliefs regarding how I live my life. I don't need to argue them though. I also have various strong political/ societal beliefs. Again no need to argue them.
If you're scrolling mindlessly consuming content which keeps drawing you in you're more likely to click on an ad for some new toothpaste.
It is difficult for even human judges to clearly define what counts as abuse and what doesn't. Automated algorithms (or manual reviews) will be much worse, most likely.
In the case of certain governments, the account owner is likely identifiable near 100% of the time, with not much effort.
Depending on what social media we're talking about, (and what corporations,) there may be corporations assembling pseudonym to identity mappings, too.
Making a law that forbids anonymity does help authoritarians, but it's mostly formalizing what is already an unspoken rule: that you can't truly be anonymous online. Other parties can throw away knowledge of you, like logless VPNs or TOR, but its next to impossible to verify they really do that.
Consider ten seconds persistence limit. Like short-term memory for the spoken word.
Remember if everyone was anonymous so would personal traits which forces judging on material and people not taking things personally because their real id isn't attach to this idea
Look at instances where the conversation is forced to respect conventional values.
It's death. Conformity and moronic mob-politics becomes the norm. So norm that you forget that there was anything better. (Reddit and Facebook are 2 notorious cases of this.)
4chan is sharp and smart. And infantile and vile. And sometimes it's hard to tell the difference. Which is only proper.
Well, it can be. But the main boards usually aren't. A lot of smart people have left the platform. What's left is mostly "bad" people who have nowhere else to go: nazis, child molesters, edgy teenagers and so on.
Our greatest artists and thinkers have been condemned throughout history. Censored too. Consider that.
>Our greatest artists and thinkers have been condemned throughout history.
Our greatest artists and thinkers were typically not nazis or child molesters.
Consider that this could be one of the motivations behind the push for things like this.
Search “Public Facilities Privacy & Security Act North Carolina”
However, I didn't actually mean the governments themselves with my comment above, but the various christian and puritan lobbying groups.
Casual homophobia remained "in" in the US until at least 2010, which is not all that long ago.
51% of Murder and nonnegligent manslaughter is committed by about 7% of the US population. This is directly from Government data.
There are real biological factors identified for this discrepancy:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monoamine_oxidase_A
This allele you've identified as the genetic reason for white superiority is most common among Asian men.
Could you provide some concrete examples? I've used Nextdoor regularly in three major US metropolitan areas, and I have yet to see anything like an "enormous racism/bigotry problem." If anything, I see sanctimonious neighbors calling each other racist at the drop of a hat.
Because of that, it creates an inherent ingroup/outgroup dynamic that doesn’t exist on most social media. In other systems, you have to create that through some kind of signaling.
As a result, that dynamic overwhelms other topics.
To ban foreign content, you got to install a China style national firewall.
But Amess was stabbed to death by a Somali migrant with ‘religious and ideological motivations’. What does that have to do with social media anonymity?
>While police are investigating whether there are any links to Islamist extremism and have not connected the killing to the targeting of MPs online, allies of Amess said he had voiced growing concern about threats and toxicity within public discourse as they demanded a crackdown.
>Francois, the MP for Rayleigh and Wickford, which neighbours Amess’s Southend West constituency, added: “I suggest that if we want to ensure that our colleague didn’t die in vain, we collectively all of us pick up the baton, regardless of our party and take the forthcoming online harms bill and toughen it up markedly.
So there is absolutely no link between his murder and seemingly any online activity, but they're still going to use his murder to to justify... harsher punishment for being mean to government employees online? Never let a crisis go to waste I guess.
Hitting the nail on the head.
I had suspected that it was a minority specifically because of the cryptic reporting of the incident, and it turns out you're right, now that a handful of US/international outlets have been willing to provide details.
And this article is part of a pattern of deflection. I watch Al Jazeera and they had the gall to interview three different minority MPs and heavily imply that minorities are being targeted.
This collective demonization of a global minority by western outlets, together with the gaslighting that whites (and especially white christians) aren't being targeted, is not going to end well. If you want to argue that its a deserved comeuppance that's one thing, but the way that these outlets implicitly collude to protect the identity of minority, and only minority attackers, is underhanded and dishonest.
It doesn't actually matter what X is, the important thing for the government is to be seen to be doing something. In reality the calls by UK politicians to end online anonymity will fizzle out in a few weeks once the media cycle moves on, as it's not something they can really do without spending an immense amount of time, money and political capital. In the mean time there will be a flurry of articles like this one rehashing debates that have been going on ever since the first troll posted the first comment on a BBS.
If I weren't anonymous this could make me unemployable
I often find myself having a wonderfully deep discussion with someone online, and when I eventually find out what they look like (etc), I often realize that they dont look as friendly, educated, etc as they are.
Humans are really bad at this, and you will put people into groups in your mind no matter how hard you try. Anonymity mostly removes this bias, and leads to real and pure equal exchange of ideas.
If, OTOH, you find out that that other person is a black guy (assuming you're white), you go through one of two reactions: If you're opinion of blacks is low, then you're really impressed. If you don't particularly like blacks (read: racist), then you're disappointed, and slightly pissed off - that that other guy knows more than you do, or know so much about a very technical topic, when he belongs to a group that you've been told are not very bright.
Humans are interesting creatures in this regards. That's why the right to remain anonymous online should be a given.
Too bad that seems impossible to effectively implement at scale.
That is the problem. It's an unsolvable problem for the near+ future - unless we shift so much power from the public to the powerful that they can silence the public on a whim.
There are technical solutions to this. The old one was called hashcash, which a predecessor to cryptocurrency.
To get an account you would have to do something like $5 in electricity worth of computation one time, which you can do without giving anyone your name. But then if you do something foolish and get banned, it'll cost you another $5 (or however much is necessary to provide a sufficient deterrent) to get a new account.
Obviously now you could just have them pay (or mine for you) a small amount of cryptocurrency, which would then go to offset the cost of banning the spammers who still try their luck.
It's $5, not $500. Anybody using an account long-term will experience more cost from having it deleted than from paying that amount for a new one.
The reason it works is that a poor person gets to amortize that $5 over the life of the account, typically ten years or more, which makes it a negligible amount even for someone making minimum wage. Whereas the spammer gets banned and needs a new account every 90 seconds.
And if the problem is that your mods are imposing censorship on disadvantaged people, you don't want something that makes that sort of "moderation" effective. But that's a different problem. Maybe try not having such a small number of large platforms so it's easier for people to abandon the ones doing such things.
That's a very limited perspective.
I do believe there was some racism to GP's remarks, that this hypothetical white guy can only make prejudice assumptions.
Many of us may be programmers but we should still be able to grok things with more nuance than this.
Why do you think this? Their spelling and grammar show few obvious mistakes to me, and after reading your comment I looked at their history and they seem to be an American for at least twenty years.
In my head, this is an example of a problem moderation or lack of anonymity won't fix. People have to learn to see this kind of comment for the dud that it is on their own.
What nonsense is that? I've never noticed any correlation between gender and technical skills. I mean, I've noticed that there are fewer women in the technical space, but not that their skills are lower.
You then seem to go on to assume all white people are racist against black people. Because both of your examples are racist.
There are pros and cons. Simply pointing out pros is not enough to win the day.
Communities without abuse problems never even float the idea of banning anonymity. One reason being it’s extremely expensive to do that if not effectively impossible.
The medium is the message. One of the messages of the Internet, as a medium, is abuse.
Now, whether the take-away is "we should try to regulate it to stop that", or "people should stop using it to post details and thoughts, alongside PII and all tied to one traceable identity, that they wouldn't ever post to the public-use notice board at the local grocery store, because it's fucking insane (as Zuck might put it, they're 'dumb fucks') to post like that on the Internet and expect it to go well", or something else, is a matter for consideration.
This implies that many communities with anonymity don't face abuse problems, so anonymity is not the root of the problem. Maybe the problem lies in the subject matter that the community handles and the sort of people that attracts.
Of course if you attract only polite people you don’t have abuse problems regardless of anonymity.
Being attacked and/or killed is almost never voluntary. Viewing anonymous posts on the internet is almost always voluntary. Whatever damage is caused is emergent from the framework of interpretations of the individual. This is closer kin to victimless crime as opposed to real crime than it is conditional rules of engagement. I'm under the impression you're engaging in sophistry though, "This is troubling logic if we expand it to other areas." You're correct, a square peg does not fit in the round hole. And you've also failed to negate the myriad arguments favoring continued anonymity with any salient cons, but have instead erected a strawman.
No it isn't. Social media is a near required part of modern life for a lot of people, especially those in the public sphere. For example, it is near impossible to be a freelance journalist without a social media account. Once you have that account, people are free to push their anonymous posts to you.
>This is closer kin to victimless crime as opposed to real crime than it is conditional rules of engagement.
This is just a baffling comment and shows you are out of touch with the type of abuse we are talking about. I can't imagine you have seen any of this first hand if you think this is "close kin to victimless crime". There are very much victims on the end of this abuse.
And I mean, there was that one time that some dude, in person at a press conference threw a shoe at George W. Bush, the President of the United States of America, he wasn't anonymous, and what level of force could've been deployed as recourse ran up to death, evidently not adequate disincentive.
I can make a victim out of myself by a few alterations in my personal narrative. I choose not to.
It is vastly harder to exclude people spreading harmful lies when they can do it under 27 trivially created and then discarded identities across 12 platform.
It's trivial to argue that people agree to engage with online communities as they agree to engage in in person communities but what is the realistic alternative? Both huddle in your basement AND don't engage online either?
It is unrealistic when your online life is a large part of people's gateway to communication and culture. People deserve to be able to engage in such without also expecting harm.
Furthermore people's online hate touches people's lives with or without their opting for engagement when the festering hate nurtured online gives birth to real world violence, mass murder, coup, collapse of civil society.
It seems trivially true that anonymity enables hate and I support both people's right to voice unpopular but not harmful ideas and consequences for those who call for hate and violence.
You may note my username is simply a plain old name and it's my real name. I cannot any longer support anonymity save for cases where safety demand it.
Do they? To me it seems that people demand credentials in most cases to merit trust from an unknown. I certainly don't hop on 4chan and assume literal factual information is being doled out in every post. Nor on Twitter, nor Fecebook. I might backtest whatever they're proposing, but remain skeptical until I've seen it with my own eyes. And in any case if we look into the annals of history, this is blatantly false, there are reams of examples of people lying in plain sight. Tyrants and demagogues, kings and courts, basically every politician, corporations, and just regular people. Of course we've always had the issue of "determination of truth", history to the victor and such.
>It is vastly harder to exclude people spreading harmful lies when they can do it under 27 trivially created and then discarded identities across 12 platform.
Let's assume we've actually objectively determined the truth: what happens when the liars are let free? They're running around screaming 1+1=3, how is it that they're going to intuited by everyone else? I suspect, as idiots. Naive interventionism in this case turns them into a divided minority instead of an integrated (and stupid) extremity. Upon being separated they go off and get more and more wild, 1+1=5, 10, 0... Their bonds grow in strength because they're made a separate minority, and far less likely to cease their stupidity.
>It's trivial to argue that people agree to engage with online communities as they agree to engage in in person communities but what is the realistic alternative? Both huddle in your basement AND don't engage online either?
For one, I'm not saying that everything everywhere had ought to have the facilities of anonymity, but that instituting a mode of state coercion blanketing every site on the internet is plainly a hazard. But this line is non-sequitur anyways, we're talking about anonymity in social media not in-person interaction.
>It is unrealistic when your online life is a large part of people's gateway to communication and culture. People deserve to be able to engage in such without also expecting harm.
How do you define harm? Here's a salient conundrum: a guy asks a girl out, she tells him she's not interested. Or the obverse, however you like it. In either case they're very likely emotionally wounded. Then what? What do we take from this?
>Furthermore people's online hate touches people's lives with or without their opting for engagement when the festering hate nurtured online gives birth to real world violence, mass murder, coup, collapse of civil society.
The Nazis did this, the Khmer Rogue did this, the Bolsheviks did this all in plain sight. Millions dead in their wake. Violence was often a means to a better end - depending on perspective. The Hellenic empire was established through warfare, Alexander has been intuited as a great unifier, bringing together a vast and highly integrated culture made of many diverse cultures. The French revolution was a supermassive turning point, and largely lead us to be where we are today, but it was extremely violent. The USA was founded after a revolutionary war. The concern is wanton violence, which in any case is rare, and I suspect anonymity on the internet has little to contribute to it overall, despite the narratives espoused by many.
Civil society is free discourse, but we've long been eroding it.
>It seems trivially true that anonymity enables hate and I support both people's right to voice unpopular but not harmful ideas and consequences for those who call for hate and violence.
If we adopt the relativistic standpoint, every opinion is harmful to someone. Utilitarianism is flawed, not everyone can be happy, even negative utilitarianism is flawed.
It seems like we would never have gotten this far if it wasn't for the kind of interactions you are defending and yet you are entangled in a debate with someone who likely grew up in a society where this approach to interaction was championed throughout their life who is simultaneously insisting that it's more harm than good.
More unsettling is the fact that when I read the sentence:
>How do you define harm? Here's a salient conundrum: a guy asks a girl out, she tells him she's not interested. Or the obverse, however you like it. In either case they're very likely emotionally wounded. Then what? What do we take from this?
I began to wonder whether if I said that in public I would end up in a lot of trouble and possibly fired for daring to suggest that being rejected could hurt the feelings of the person being rejected in an equally valid way as it may make the person being asked out feel uneasy.
I eagerly await the day when I do not constantly feel terrorized by the threat of becoming socially outcast for saying something which should be entirely benign but which has become taboo.
Please ask yourself how you would feel if this site did that -- or even, in fact, if HN didn't actually make anon accounts (without even requiring an email confirmation) so easy that it's an incredibly common occurrence.
One of the things I like about HN is that while anonymity is certainly possible having an identity which is known to the community (whether that be one's actual identity, or in my case a pseudonymous one), allows us to build (and/or repudiate/destroy, as we choose) credibility and engage in discussions over time.
I will say that 'nobody9999' is not the name on my passport, nor is it the name I use with my bank or (when I actually used such things) social media accounts.
However, a search through HN's archives will, nonetheless, provide a history of my comments and submissions.
Should I turn into a raving asshole, the admins/moderators can sanction/ban me without ever knowing my 'legal' name.
That makes a lot more sense than forcing folks to tie their legal identities to everything they do online.
It's enough to convince vulnerable people who are calling out the misdeeds of the powerful.
It might not be enough to sway the powerful who compulsively deploy (Gov/Corp/LEO) revenge on people who call them out.
Vulnerable people like the trans community that is often the victim in this type of anonymous social media abuse? Are they allowed to call out the powerful and disproportionately white straight cis men who control social media companies and allow this abuse to continue?
I just find it funny that you are using an argument that is identical to the one used by some of the people you are arguing against.
50% /s
I'm 100% against it tbh. There are people that would be dead without it(just in case anyone missed the sarcasm)
There are also people who are dead because of the abuse they took on social media. Once again, the same argument from both sides.
There is nothing other than anonymity than can provide the pro put forth by the OP. On the other hand, the "cons," you are making non-specific reference towards are achievable by any number of strategies and are a common facet of everyday life.
An excellent (sarcasm registered and understood, BTW) point.
I am a practitioner of BDSM[0], which is, in some circles, quite controversial.
Despite the fact that my activities are always consensual and never cause harm to anyone, if my employer, clients or others with whom I have unrelated interactions with had negative ideas about such things, I could suffer serious repercussions.
I generally don't discuss such things online (or offline, if those I'm around aren't trusted), but if I did (as I am now), forcing me to link those discussions with my "legal" identity, could inflict real damage on my life -- even though nothing that I do is illegal or harmful.
As such, Vangelis is 100% correct. My private activities, unrelated to my work, are none of my employer's (or anyone else's) business, nor is it a danger/threat to anyone. If I didn't have the veil of pseudonymity here, I would never even hint at it.
And that's the problem with de-anonymization.
[0] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/BDSM
Instead of banning anonymity (which is a ridiculous thing to do), platforms can provide better tools to allow users to curate content or join discussion rooms.
If you want some type of troll blocker to prevent spam accounts, you can use an anonymous crypto in junction with sign-up for a small fee that is inconsequential to a single user but painful at scale for users that generate many accounts.
With total anonymity you end up with trolls or people who are just seriously misinformed arguing vigorously.
You can spend the time and present arguments to possibly convince an actual reasonable person. It gets tiresome over time posting the same basic information. Most of the boards on there end up with a good baseline of information for their topics over years, but for anyone slightly knowledgeable it is tiresome to move topics to that eventual baseline and especially to move them past it. That same information can usually be collected from less toxic sources in a few months as opposed to years that the collective takes.
Every once in a while you'll get a fresh expert that hasn't gotten tired of posting the same information, but I stopped years ago bothering to share any information I had. It's always an up hill battle and the posts will be gone in a few hours or, at best, days
But trolls end up dominating. If you waste your time writing informed sourced posts about anything (slavery is bad, the Holocaust happened, Earth isn't flat, etc) all that will happen is the person will eventually just criticize basic grammar mistakes, insult you, and post the same garbage in a new thread.
If you make the mistake of arguing with organized trolls, you'll get link bombed with shit sources and barely tangentially related long sources that suck up your time before you realize that they don't present any facts that are actually relevant to the discussion.
Even 4chan knows this. The business board has measures in place to inform readers when a poster is the same person.
Real names are not needed online to have good discussion. But it's absolutely needed for posters to have repercussions for past posts. True anonymity leads to shallow discussion and trolls.
Satoshi Nakamoto.
Associate anonymous posts with an optional pubkey signing. Have tooling that can filter out bad actor signatures and highlight the ones you care about.
Have your interest graph and peer graph suggest new public keys to follow.
Identities can remain private.
Fortunately there is work being done in this area by Free Software projects. In particular, the Matrix team are trying to implement a decentralised reputation system[0] and there's no reason this couldn't be applied to the Fediverse too.
[0] https://matrix.org/blog/2020/10/19/combating-abuse-in-matrix...
It's effective because you follow the profiles that you find interesting, when a profile becomes abusive you simply block them from being replicated by your machine. Folks can have as many profiles/feeds as they like, so you can separate out portions of your life that others might find distasteful, or boring.
The crypto aspect can obscure a series of posts by the same author although I don't think it would protect you from the site owner themselves.
First of all being anonymous is important if you want to call out far more powerful entities than you, which can lash out to you. Second I think it is important to see, what the darker side of society thinks. Even if you remove them from the normal internet, they will still find a way to communicate, but now it is no longer out in the open. It is better to know then to not know.
Compare 4chan to HN, which is also open to anybody like 4chan, allows anonymous (or rather pseudonymous) posting, and has a somewhat sizeable community of people posting and many more "lurkers" just reading.
Unlike 4chan however, HN does a reasonable job - in my opinion - of being clear what is allowed and what is not, enforces these community standards quite vigorously most of the time, through moderation not just by moderators but the community (flagging), and generally stops outright abuse and harassment, and more often than not stops trolls and people accidentally starting flame wars. That has to be balanced against not over-banning/over-flagging content, which happens, too. Not everything is perfect in the niche that is HN - nothing ever is - but the contrast to 4chan is quite stark, even to the supposedly more moderate and "sfw" 4chan boards like /g/ (technology).
Gamification is a double edged sword. On one hand, it may encourage people to instead of their actual views post quick quips or hide their true opinions and opt instead to just say what they believe the community wants to hear. On the other hand, in places like 4chan which lack such gamification, you don't have to fear burning your reputation as nobody has a visible reputation, which may encourage people to cross lines as there is no way for the community to sanction such behavior.
It's also hard for some people to understand that individuals who hold extreme views and use poor sources/facts could, in fact, be people who actually hold those views. They're not trolls. They're not doing it to get a rise out of you. Sometimes, those people are legitimate in their beliefs, regardless of how ass-backwards they are.
And I don't know why people don't understand that.
Compare that to forums which are based on usernames, where there is usually higher quality discussion because you have a post history and this weeds out the bots and trolls.
Will I remember "lionkor" among thousands of other HN posters and think about your previous posts? No. But I can click and see your other posts, if the site lets me have that feature. And more importantly, your REPUTATION tells me how many people have upvoted your content that you produce. That's what's relevant. I could also maybe see how strongly you support certain positions (tags/badges) in your profile. It's the latter (reputations and badges) which can serve as a filter for people to set up if they want to ignore trolls and sybil accounts: https://xkcd.com/810/
Similarly we don't need human-readable URLs, we could do perfectly fine with hashes and no politics about domain names. The domain name system is just a glorified search engine, and URLs are only useful for landing on the homepage of a site ... anything longer becomes increasingly hard to verbally communicate, and if we're doing it non-verbally then we may as well send a non-readable URL (e.g. via a link or QR code or a javascript variable).
This is what I wish I said! It's about what you say, not who you are, everything else will just be used for bias and "cancelling".
I hang out on IRCs a fair bit, and those are almost perfect for this. Maybe if instead of usernames it would just be numbers, that'd be perfect.
Simple and effective exchange of ideas, without any bias as to "who is this", "what do they look like", etc.
Second all of these arguments seem to suggest just letting the government know you identity as some sort of compromise, but what about when it is the government I am trying to avoid, sure someone can dox me, or can tell my employer to fire me, but only the government can arrest me and execute me if they determine I've done something to upset someone powerful enough within the government. Sure the government can eventually track me down with their resources, but anything that makes it harder is better.
Yes and no. Anonymity also prompts people to make lots of assumptions about you based on what and how you say things that may not hold and may even distort how the messages are received.
For example, I'm an ethnic minority but if I break from certain aspects of identarian political dogma it is generally assumed that I am White. Women who deviate from a certain line on gender issues are, similarly, often assumed to be male unless they indicate otherwise. On issues where a person's lived experiences stemming from their identity might matter, the assumption of there being a 'default' identity ends up kind of polarizing perspectives and eliding nuances and potential middle-ground on a host of issues.
Put another way, it has been said that "on the internet nobody knows you're a dog." But not everyone defines themselves by their "dogness" to the same extent, nor does being a "dog" mean the same thing to all dogs. But since we assume everyone is a default template until they loudly and proudly fly an identifying marker, the only voices who speak for the dogs will be the doggiest of the doggy, the people whose identity as dogs is the most important thing to them in that moment.
Bringing that back to a concrete example, I remember when I first made the switch from Windows to Macintosh in the early aughts (in the peak of the Switch ad era). Initially making the switch was kind of a revelation. I had really just never experienced a computer that was well designed before nor technology that put this much attention towards--what I would later learn to refer to as--UI/UX. I could not stop evangelizing this to everyone who would listen because, to me, it was new and super cool and I was just really really enthusiastic about it. This happened often enough that Apple fanatics online got a reputation for being over-exuberant and kind of deluded. But the thing is, after a few years I just stopped posting about Apple stuff because I had grown into having more balanced and nuanced perspectives on computing. But the assumption in a place like Slashdot back then was that you're a Linux or Windows guy unless you state otherwise. Thus only the newly converted, over-excited Apple fanboys are taken as representative of Mac users and the ones with mellower perspectives are drowned out.
With computing platforms it's all rather frivolous and probably doesn't matter. But when it comes to social or political issues, this dynamic can have real effects on what we think of as an authentically [group] opinion and who gets to speak for whom. I think it has a tendency to foster a certain essentialist way of looking at the world that is rife with ecological fallacies.
Unfortunately often we do rely on the other person’s reputation, giving us information as to their possible biases and an initial estimate of their level of competence on the subject matter, in order to assign the appropriate weight to their opinions - especially when it comes to topics outside our scope of expertise.
With anonymity we often put everyone on the same level thus won’t be able to properly weigh varying opinions and filter out opinions that are the least likely to be of value.
Yes, banning anonymity is dumb idea.
Also, opt-in authenticated identity is necessary.
It's ridiculous that bots, trolls, and sockpuppets are given the same esteem and protections as real people.
To curtail harassment, nerf the outrage machine (algorithmic newsfeeds) and ad revenue biz models.
I'm fine with bots if they're obviously bots. I think it was US Senator Mark Warner that proposed that reform.
Agreed. I think any talk of the problems of online anonymity should be focused on bots first and foremost. From my understanding, it's pretty easy to detect like 90% of bot users. Can't we go after those instead? I don't really care that real people online can be mean anonymously, because at the end of the day, it's just one person. But an army of bots? That has a much stronger affect, especially when they all amplify each other's posts and game the algorithms so that they get promoted and seen by more people.
Any talk of the "dangers of online anonymity" that isn't about bots is just a deceptive way of arguing for more online surveillance. This example seems especially egregious, because they're somehow using an MP's murder to push it even though it has literally nothing to do with it.
My point was more that bots are way more harmful than real people online, and any policy on online anonymity intended to "help" people should be focused almost entirely on bots, not people.
How to tell someone’s never worked on anti-abuse at scale
The problem with anti-abuse at scale isn't catching the 90-99%. It is the remaining 1%. Have 10M abuse accounts with a 99% success rate and you are left with 100k spam accounts. That, and making sure you aren't catching too many innocent customers in your efforts.
I take it as a given that Facebook, NSA, whomever, have uniquely identified every person, living and dead. I just don't understand how or why fake accounts are created.
Smaller outfits like metafilter need some kind of gatekeeper. Like require nominal fee or scan of ID or verification photo.
Strong disagree in that I think most of the problems people identify with FB are due to the collective actions of mostly real people in conversation.
Speaking only on the money side of this, that is a very easy (and popular) thing to say, but a very difficult thing to do. How would you support these services without the ad revenue business model? Most of the other business models people have tried do not pay the salaries of the network operations people required to run the service.
And I can only imagine that even today people are still going to be reticent to pay for most of the social media services they get online. Most will just wait for another free social media service to come along.
To rid ourselves of ad revenue based business models and algorithms, we need to find, and prove, new business models that work at scale. They don't have to rake in as much money as ads, but they do need to pay for operations and the resultant salaries. And that's not a small amount of money at scale.
I believe but cannot prove than most targeted advertising is fraudulant. When whistleblowers leak those metrics, this might be a self correcting problem.
Meanwhile...
There are plenty of other ways to run a business.
metafilter, craigslist, ravelery.org, others do well, without harming their users.
Yes, if my feed is composed entire of accounts I follow sorted by date descending, there is little to no opportunity nor incentive for bots to exist at all. Sure, our proverbial crazy uncle is still going to send out conspiracy theories to everyone in his contacts, but this has existed forever and never seemed to cause that much trouble compared to algorithmic newsfeeds.
Even if you include results from followed topics sorted by explicit upvotes, so long as there's none of these inferred engagement metrics used in ranking then the blast radius of a malicious account will be severely limited as it's a lot harder to game explicitly expressed user intent.
Yes and:
Nerfing could be as modest as dialing down virality. Like maybe a rate regulator.
IIRC, the velocity of rage posting is way greater than puppies and kittens. So just slow that crap down. Or just don't turbo boost it to big with.
You can still pick any alias you want, but mods see your location within, say, 100 miles.
Imagine reddit with no bots, banning has consequences, and local subreddits can actually just be people who live there.
The painful sign up flow makes that totally unreasonable, but it would vastly improve my online community experience to live without bots and more limited trolls.
*edit to clarify* -- i don't want them to _have_ my ID, just use some kind of service from stripe or visa or whoever where they get a hash, so that banning is stickier.
"Don't get hacked and dump PII" is sort of a prerequisite for starting any online business these days, so I don't see that as a huge downside beyond the already comically difficult signup flow. Ideally, ID verification comes from someone like stripe or visa who's core business is handling that data, so the host is only storing a hash and a location.
Any amount of money that would make it cost prohibitive to get banned would also kill the userbase.
You could cover your face during the filming, or temporarily affix the paper to some surface, like a tree, and then upload your video clip to a selection of randomly chosen existing members who would cross-reference your location with Google street view, and try to check that the image isn't a deep fake.
Of course people would eventually start offering a paid service of carrying out this process on behalf of the bot farmers, but the algorithm could demand that your filming location not be somewhere that a lot of people have already used for their recordings, which would push up the cost of someone trying to create multiple identities locally to them.
Also, offering this location spoofing service could be classed as (conspiracy to commit) fraud, and the risks of getting caught by going to a specific location at a specific time as part of a sting operation should be pretty high, and not worth being paid minimum wage for.
Both ideas seem imperfect, but obviously a system that links your ID to your face is less private than one which links your ID to a circle of radius 100 miles.
It is also interesting to see that the system I linked to uses a "court" system among its members, where people are randomly picked to adjudicate claims about invalid IDs. There is even a system for claiming that a user has died and having their key revoked if they cannot prove they are alive.
[0] https://www.proofofhumanity.id/
A bit of a long and winding road to head off in the direction of noting that some of the old techniques that were being explored in the crypto cambrian explosion of the early 90s are still out there and still have merit. They just seem buried in the back-and-forth jousting between all or nothing when it comes to online identity.
There are more people who think abusive behavior is bad than there are abusers who think it's good. If all the people who think it's bad call it out when they see it, avoid people who do it, make a point admonishing people who do it, refuse to accept working with people who do it at work, refuse to socialize with people who do it in social situations, refuse to watch TV shows where it's shown to be funny, refuse to pay to see it at the cinema, and so on then, eventually, it would start to stop.
Literally the only way to stop it is if society as a collective group makes it clear that it's not acceptable.
Sadly this means we're stuck with it.
Then they added user accounts and a login. Anonymous posting persisted (the famous Anonymous Coward) but impersonating mostly stopped.
If I understood it correctly, the third party would hold your ID etc, and would vouch for you on signup to services. Users would be anonymous/pseudonymous until a warrant was acquired by the police.
A third party would be better IMO than the government. Not sure I like it either way tho. Who is the third party? Breaches would be an issue as the other poster has said. And too much like big brother.
Now that people are used to that idea, I expect a government to say "Why don't you store the logs on our computers instead, to save money and be protected with military-grade security. We promise we will still go to the hassle of getting a warrant before reading from the database... Unless of course there's an emergency...".
Perhaps the reason they haven't said this yet is because government cyber-security agencies have already gained real-time unwarranted access to the ISPs' logs. I don't suppose a company could be sued for not correctly securing this data against the government, since the government could hide behind "national security" to block any evidence being admitted in a court case.
Spread the third parties among jurisdictions and make N large enough that no government has enough of the third parties under its jurisdiction to be able to coerce an identity reveal.
But in all seriousness, there are a lot of women (and men) who have suffered abuse by a partner. Not having anonymous social media accounts ends up being at the very least exclusionary, and at the very worst can lead to physical harm (even murder) by an abusive partner easily tracking someone down.
The other elephant in the room here, is that abusive social media messages have nothing to do with the death of David Amess.
The web need not be homogenous. Omegle, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, hacker news... They can all exist differently and that's fine.
Because free discourse cannot be completely stifled by the powers that be if there exists anywhere where people are allowed to express their honest opinions without fear of retribution.
Who does like anonymity? Government dissidents. Reporters. Human rights workers and investigators.