Comment by JoshCole | Hacker News Reader

Comment by JoshCole | Hacker News Reader

> However, a small minority of people who use anonymity servers are sociopaths who are attracted by the ease with which they can avoid responsibility and accountability for their actions.

Yeah. No.

This argument against is old enough that it is now a straw man.

There are known state-level actors actively pushing propaganda through the internet. There are companies founded with the express purpose of providing influence in exchange for money. There are companies founded with the express purpose of providing bot accounts to make it seem as if a person is more popular than they are.

There is an industry and state level actors abusing anonymity online to shift discourse, with real life consequences more severe than death having already resulted. It isn't unreasonable to suppose that it is possible that millions of people will die as a consequence of some of the manipulations which has already occurred, given UN projections regarding the effect of climate change.

We accelerate in progression as we progress. 1995 is a lifetime ago. You might as well link Plato.

Recent google slides which made it to Hacker News frontpage has a slide that put the estimate of bot traffic on the internet near 30% of all traffic.

Taxes can be great; taxes without representation aren't. Anonymity can be great; anonymity for people with hostile motives who influence things which do not relate to themselves are not.

Have a little subtlety.

Edit:

I'm getting downvoted. Go watch Facebook testimony to congress and similar things in which their is admission of acts as vile as extremist groups being intentionally provoked into armed conflict being performed on online platform. Go read about the IRA and probes into Russian influence on social media. Stop being so ignorant, Hacker News. I get that you filter bubble out political talk, but in case you missed it, there is an actual reason behind why California is moving forward with a law to ban bots which don't confess to being a bot and similar laws designed to curtail these influence campaigns. Its not that legislators are insane.

>There are known state-level actors actively pushing propaganda through the internet.

The last group of people who will be thwarted by lack of anonymity on the web are "state-level actors". Literally.

> There are companies founded with the express purpose of providing influence in exchange for money.

Probably the second- or third- last group of people who would be thwarted by deanonymization.

> The last group of people who will be thwarted by lack of anonymity on the web are "state-level actors".

So you think Facebook adopting non-anonymous political ads as their policy was done because the intent wasn't to go after corporations and governments interfering with the political process? That instead, these people are the very last people who are going to be targeted?

The truth of the matter is that the first people targeted were these groups, but that they have the most resources, so may be most capable of overcoming these limits and causing harm anyway.

Propagandists prefer to not use the ad system - they have hoards of sockpuppet accounts to astroturf with for free, and its more persuasive if not clearly paid speech.

Yeah. Really though I'd rather not get into that. People are already trying to take what I said farther than intended for it to be taken. I was just trying to point out how badly this 1995 post anticipated the future. It thought the problem would be a limited number of sociopathic trolls. Makes sense as something born out of the era. Doesn't correlate with what actually causes problems in practice nowadays.

i agree that people were a bit naive in the 90s with respect to anticipating the problems with the internet, but i can't agree that anonymity is what they were wrong about. i find that people post much more concerning things on facebook pages, under their real names, than i have ever seen on sites like 4chan.

The problem isn't that people are acting anonymously, the problem is that individuals and organizations are acting to impersonate the non-anonymous.

follower counts only impact people because of the assumption that each follower is a _real_ person, which is a direct effect of the deanonymization we see today by social networks.

propaganda has significantly more impact when it is perceived to come from "just another normal person" rather than an anonymous bot.

> propaganda has significantly more impact when it is perceived to come from "just another normal person" rather than an anonymous bot.

Yes. Exactly.

I am commenting with a pseudonym on this website and I'm sure I hold many views which you would attribute to "bots". I am however a real person and not even Russian! Most of the people who you disagree with are the same, you must accept that.

But I was told that anybody that disagreed with the liberal bubble mentality of silicon valley was either a russian bot or was Brett Kavanaugh on a bender.

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