Hacker News Reader

Aren't these more or less the arguments used to justify anti-cryptography legislation? And when articles about banning encryption come up on here, people say pretty much the same thing: "Don't let the worries about its usage by 'bad' people overshadow the good".

In fact I believe this tool is even more worrisome, because there are a very large number of non-tech savvy people who express their dissonant opinions simply under the mask imparted by internet anonymity. I imagine most everyone here on HN have at least once made an anonymous account to post a comment somewhere that they would rather not have tied to their identity. This is an avenue that is necessary for the preservation of free speech. Remember that things like treating black people as equals, giving women the right to vote, gay rights, etc were and in some ways still are taboo subjects that bring the wrath and ire of the power du jure.

All that said, I still don't see any reason why such a tool shouldn't be released. Why? Even though I believe the tool to be harmful, it's better to know that it exists, know its capabilities, and most importantly know how it works. It'll end up in the hands of the wrong people anyway, so it's better to at least get it into the hands of the right people who can possible do something to combat it.

" Even though I believe the tool to be harmful, it's better to know that it exists, know its capabilities, and most importantly know how it works"

This is a really important point. Even if you don't like the possible uses of the tool, it's either "release it now and make it possible to defend against" or "don't release it, and hope the likes of the NSA don't develop their own version".

>"2. Being able to identify troublemakers in a community (such as a forum or a social networking site). I'm sure a lot of administrators would love to know if that suspicious looking new guy is the alias of a banned troll from a few weeks back (posting through a proxy server)."

Orwellian.

It would certainly run the risk of false positives.

This is a good point though. Even a 5% chance of it misidentifying someone as a troublemaker would be a problem for an online community site, and it's likely the actual chance is a fair bit higher than that (because it's likely not been tested on a particularly large scale in this context).

So, what do you when a troll persistently and constantly attacks your community website?

As in, flames everyone to a crisp, posts as much porn as possible, tries to incite a civil war between a few members that might not be on good terms with each other or the staff and registers hundreds of accounts, some of which stay semi dormant until they strike?

Because that can happen very easily online, especially if you get the ire of someone with a lot of free time and very few morals. Or if your site ends up at war with a troll site/gets raided by 4chan.

Do you avoid the hassle now, or wait until the situation blows up and half the site is now in the middle of it?

Ban behavior, not people. You can convert non-productive people to productive people, most of them only want to be noticed or accepted and past a certain point there is only so much you can do to block anyone anyway. Stylometric analysis would just be another simple hurdle to cross for a persistent person.

The idea that this tool would be useful for community management is terrible.

You can convert non-productive people to productive people, most of them only want to be noticed or accepted

I'm a moderator of multiple online spaces.

A few months ago, in one of them, a user got too heated and started flinging insults at someone else. As was standard policy for the place where it was occurring, I issued the user a ban of a few days (enforced cooling-off) and pointed to our guidelines on how to behave.

This user then proceeded, over a period of months, to continually harass me, send me increasingly graphic threats, and try to track me down in real life.

Pray tell, how exactly would you go about "converting" such a person to be productive? I come to you since you are apparently quite the expert on it, or else you wouldn't be giving out advice to just "convert" people.

Do we really need machine learning deanonymisation tools to identify trolls so unsubtle and obvious?

I voted to release the tool, but you've set up this false scenario with the intention of knocking it down easily and discrediting the opposing argument.

In my day, we'd use moderators: put the forum/list in a mode where every new post goes through a human review first. After a while, things calm down, and you revert to the anything-goes default.

I don't know how well that would work for high-traffic forums of today, but it can scale pretty easily by employing many moderators.

http://www.netlingo.com/word/moderated-mailing-list.php

ISTM that any site that is capable of controlling spam, is also capable of dealing with trolls. Sure spam is more repetitive than trolls, so it's easier to notice automatically, but there is also much more spam, so chances are that at least some will get through. If you have moderators authorized to zap spam, let them zap trollage as well.

That's especially troubling because the easiest and cheapest thing for any commercial service to do is to ban forever and without appeal any user that presents a hint of trouble to the algorithm. If these services have near monopolies, or share data with all of the other services like CLUE does for insurance... Its like a digital death sentence.

Ask anyone who's ever lost an ebay or a google account to an algorithmic burp and was essentially banned for life without appeal or even human oversight.

What about Russian trolls that have infected the internet, trying to manipulate public opinion or just collect data on regular citizens? Or Correct The Record? Or just about any other mass propaganda campaign? This would be very helpful

Well, if it works, it probably only works for a little while. This is because people who don't want to be identified can run it too, and they can change their prose until they can't be identified.

Whats worse, after a while, and enough trolling in different styles, this tool might ban more and more legitimate attempts to communicate.

Essentially killing anonymity on the web is not worth any of these. Facebook alone provides a huge data trove of people's real names linked to posts that this machine could parse. Anyone with any form of professional presence on the web would possibly be vulnerable to any comments long enough to be matched on other sites.

Unfortunately if the tech exists, it will be released, but I don't think the positives outweigh the negatives here. The chilling effects in terms of comments alone would be bad.

I'd guess if it can be used to identify you, it can be used to adjust your new posts until they don't appear to be written by you: for a practical example, a Chrome addon that detects when you are making social media posts and automatically flags identifying information like a spellcheck does. So the thing can be used to counter itself.

Well not necessarily.

1 and 2 could both be a bet negative for humanity just as easily as they could be a positive.

Yeah, I just realised a few negative uses for 1 right now. Like those cases where a business threatens to sue anyone who leaves negative feedback, and hence such a tool could be used to unmask anonymous reviewers giving a honest evaluation of their products/services.

Or maybe an odd case where it turns out the author of a book or creator of a product finds out someone they know in real life left the negative review and physically attacks them or something.