Anonymity and the Dark Side of the Internet | Hacker News Reader

Anonymity and the Dark Side of the Internet

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com

13 pointsjgfoot16 comments

Anonymity is vitally important. The claim is that sunshine is a good disinfectant, and that's generally true, but when it comes to communication, sunshine (the scrutiny of others) can have the opposite effect, it can infect your speech with false ideas. Our time is as bad as any other when it comes to heresy.

There are groups out there who will persecute you for saying the truth. If you don't believe this, try taking a public stand against the actions of a certain new religion. Or try making any criticism at all of a certain old religion. These groups and others like them have made it extraordinarily costly for an individual to associate themselves with perfectly correct beliefs. And now the same groups would like to strip others of their anonymity, ostensibly so they can stamp out any dissent at all.

As someone who values the truth, I find this troubling.

'What is remarkable about this volume is that the legal academics who make the arguments I have rehearsed are by and large strong free-speech advocates. Yet faced with the problems posed by the Internet, they start talking about “low value” speech (a concept strong first-amendment doctrine rejects) and saying things like “autonomy resides not in free choice per se but in choosing wisely” and “society needs not an absence of ‘chill,’ but an optimal level.”(In short, let’s figure out which forms of speech we should discourage.)'

Depressing.

What part of this depresses you?

What depresses me about it is that their basic argument is "too much free speech is a bad thing". Really? Have people become so uncritical that we need to protect them from themselves by limiting the most powerful communication/free speech tool ever invented?

Edit: their not there

The part where it more or less parses as "Etiquette is more important than freedom of speech, and should be legally enforced at the expense of it."

That people I respect who used to be free speech advocates now are talking about "low value" speech etc. Check out the quote from Daniel Solove: “the law is hampered because it overprotects free speech.”

Do you really think there's no such thing as "low-value speech"? I'm not asking whether you think it's OK to regulate it.

Different levels of speech get different protection (political speech, commercial speech, etc.) but I don't like the term "low-value speech". Who decides the value?

What about categorically low-value speech? Deliberately false and malicious speech?

Defamatory speech isn't protected. But I still don't think "low-value" is a helpful description.

For example take comments on Slashdot or wherever saying "first post" (or "first comment" or whatever). Do they have value? Most would say no. Does that mean they shouldn't be protected?

Defamatory speech is also protected to a degree because it isn't possible to weed out beforehand, but carries consequences and could be censored after the fact.

I meant "protected" in the legal sense, but you're right.

I find "Information is dependent on where it comes from" more depressing. It is far too easy to go from there to "your arguments don't matter because I've already made up my mind."

I haven't given this too much thought but it strikes me that it is the medium rather than the message or messenger that is troubling. It just might be difficult for people to understand the internet.

Think about it this way- we have no idea if someone is writing an opinion piece in the newspaper under a pseudonym. Sure, we could take it up with the newpaper legally, but that doesn't really change anything, and that might be the only difference between a newspaper and google in this case; google couldn't find out exactly who it was, but a newspaper should know.

Or, someone in academia could be completely faking credentials, name, tenure, experience and without diligence we wouldn't be aware. Again, it is more verifiable than someone leaving anonymous responses on Yelp or Google, but is that the main difference then? if we can reference check that person?

Another, maybe more naive way for me to think about this is that when I manage a team I don't make rules to stop the edge case/corner case behavior...you give guidelines and a high level overview of what acceptable behavior is. Otherwise you end up with a really strict, really rigid environment with rules that no one can comprehend or follow for some reason that no one can remember. No one wants to live in that environment. If we enact legislature to stop extremely low percentage behavior we end up in a similar spot politically. Not sure it is a solid argument, but it seems to make sense, roughly.

I believe the author is taking issue with the notion that "the truth will out" in the marketplace of ideas.

In this I sympathize with Fish. It is as though the truth's-being-out was some final result, rather than merely an ephemeral change in constantly changing cultural winds. This smacks of the happily-ever-after narrative to which America so frequently retreats, having not as a culture experienced any evidence to the contrary since the Civil War (perhaps none ever, since even then, righteousness prevailed, no?).

Even if the inconvenient truth is for a period (we cannot say "finally") adopted as the social consensus, what of the damage done in the meantime?

More barely concealed anti-wikileaks pro-facebook propaganda from the establishment.

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