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Comment by marketingPro | Hacker News Reader

2 solutions-

Everything must happen in-person on paper, typed by computers, offline. I've already gotten in the habit of having friends leave their phones in the house and go on a walk when talking about sensitive information (tech IP)

For propaganda/astroturfing, stop using websites that don't require verification. There should be a real person behind every comment. Anonymous websites still will exist, but that's less trustworthy than someone putting their reputation on the line.

Edit-added emphasis on having anonymous websites since it wasn't being read.

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I like proposition A, but proposition B is not good. Real names policies mean people who are at risk of violence or job loss (e.g. domestic abuse, transgender, religious and ethnic minorities, poor people) must either conform or risk themselves for having a political voice. Given official news and political parties lie constantly about state affairs, real names don't even help with trustworthiness! Look at the President.

Instead, I would advocate that you should read everything critically and that any news you accept must meet some evidence threshold and logically make sense in a coherent narrative. Learning real history helps.

I strongly suspect that we were lied to about the rationale for real names policies on Google, FB, etc. They wanted data for their advertising business and to help enforce political conformity (their businesses benefit from a politically stable base of operations). It clearly didn't help suppress hate speech or insane conspiracy theories.

I don't have a real problem distinguishing real from fake news, research and verification come naturally to me. But although I hear this recommendation frequently, it offers nothing to help with the tidal wave of gullible/dishonest people who spread false information. I would like to ignore them, but a) that requires additional effort, much like filtering spam and b) ignoring them is unwise to some degree, as such people can have a significant impact in the real world by spreading misinformation.

When I first expressed worries about the 'qanon' thing several years ago, friends and family asked me why I wasted time studying such nonsense. Now it's an international phenomenon with electoral leverage; and it's still hard to get people to give their time to study and understand it as a strategic problem rather than simply mocking or belittling the adherents. It's a bit like trying to explain to a clever developer that a brilliant architectural design can be compromised by idiots and that the user interface requires artificial friction or safety rails.

It's not that your preference for an educated polity full of critical thinkers is wrong, it would be delightful. The problem is that stupid and mean people are indifferent or outright hostile to such a long-term goal and are perfectly willing and capable of wrecking things in the short term for their own selfish ends.

It's not that I think critical thinking is an insanely effective approach, I just don't think there are non-political solutions (i.e. requiring organizing people for a more hopeful future). Getting people to join political groups and getting them to feel less alone on a non-conspiracy basis would do wonders. I just don't think technocratic solutions will work because either they restrict political speech, abuse people into staying politically conformist when that is clearly failing, or are ineffective and harm people.

For example, you might demand FB and Youtube stop using their divisive engagement strategies, but that would violate their profit motive so they won't. The only solutions are political organizing.

>The problem is that stupid and mean people are indifferent or outright hostile to such a long-term goal and are perfectly willing and capable of wrecking things in the short term for their own selfish ends.

Watching Attenborough's new netflix film [0] last night, I think I said [1] almost exactly the same thing.

[0] https://www.netflix.com/title/80216393

[1] OK, yelled at the tv in a blind rage.

>Given official news and political parties lie constantly about state affairs....

This would stop. This is what we want to stop.

I don't think "real name" policies are enough. FB, Google, and Twitter need to collect credit cards and take deposits that are lost when you use your account to spread lies and hate.

Who defines lies and hate. Hint: is the the republicans and democrats who lie and spread hate the most. While the lies and hate are somewhat different neither side is willing to give up anything.

Also you will run into first amendment issues.

Yeah, I'm arguing for monumental shift in our entire society. Some things will have to change.

>Who defines lies and hate.

I would argue we need a much cheaper, more efficient court system, where a group of peers is gathered to examine evidence. In other words "society" does. They can also consider if the lie was deliberate or a mistake, leading to harsher penalties.

This sounds like a recipe for exacerbating climate change denialism. Let the truth be defined by your peers? I don't think so.

My understanding is that, that's how most science works. Experts come to a consensus.

Except that who did the analysis is part of the analysis, which allows you to select and trace based on qualifications that you think are important. This above proposal sounds like a bunch of random people off the street, which is not at all going to result in the same quality of analysis. If the proposal is to create a board of qualified information judges and a process for selecting those judges, I could get behind that.

You know their names right now. They are displayed in a banner on the TV.

The hate speech and insane theories from anonymous/unaccountable profiles underpin and bolster what you see on TV.

I rather enjoy seeing people furious that they cannot hold people accountable for some perceived sleights. Makes me happy, especially in these times, we should never give that up again. I don't see this as a problem, I see it as a feature.

There are cases where it can be bad, but I would have problems giving any examples. Wouldn't change the point anyway.

Many of those people post under their real name.

Like a security deposit. You could get it back a year later with a slight increase that doubles as a payment for the data they've harvested.

If you make public comments often real names don't really matter. My coworkers know who I am here even though I've never told them - it isn't hard to sort out what I say here and conversations in the office.

In short, if you really are in a at risk group you need to stay off the internet, everything you do adds to your risk that you are tracked. It doesn't matter much effort you take to hide your tracks (which everyone should take anyway...), if you have a reason to worry you need to get off the internet.

This is wrong thinking. Nobody can really control when someone takes a nefarious interest in them. Public identity is only fine if there's nobody out there who wants to harm you. But since you can't control who wants to harm you, you can't really decide in advance if having a public identity is OK or not. The answer isn't "stay off the Internet" which is tantamount to "don't leave your house." This is why Facebook tries to put controls in the hands of the tagged; they only did that after a string of teenage suicides related to cyber bullying. Surely these kids thought they had no reason to be so concerned. But it turned out they did, they couldn't control the damage done to their reputation, and killed themselves.

Your coworkers aren't the only people in the world who might have interest in what you have to say.

HN doesn’t require any real verification, not that there are any good verification solutions out there the “best” rely on mobile numbers which are both easily spoofed and also can lock you out sometimes as numbers do get reused.

I am far less likely to use a site that requires me to verify my identity than not, unless they provide a substantial service they don’t need to know who I am.

I will echo that I will absolutely never use my REAL identity publicly online for anything.

It only takes ONE lawsuit/stalker/arrest/accusation/divorce/etc... for people to learn this lesson.

Privacy is worth WAY more than comment/post/tweet visibility.

Why do you think HN is better than Facebook? It's definitely not more reliable. There's less mods, so there is high risks of disinformation.

As far as I understand, solution A is what Russia uses itself - e.g. Putin and his 'HQ' does not handle any electronic documents whatsoever, all document processing of that level is done with typewriters, not even offline computers; communication is done by wired 'dumb' phones that only do voice and in some cases hardware encryption of the voice.

You can have a hack-proof office by ensuring that no digital devices are present, no computers, no cellphones. You can't hack Putin's emails because there aren't any. There are drawbacks, of course, but it's certainly possible to work that way.

So great to hear somebody else say the anonymous internet is the problem. I've been saying it for a while but its very unpopular.

I think if you "publish" something on the internet, you should be held responsible if it causes harm.

Why not both?

I _don't_ think we should have an anonymous web, because that's how we get flat earthers, pizzagate, and qanaon.

I would love to see a world where conspiracy nuts would throw their passion and enthusiasm into something that's real.

Tons of those guys in facebook and in real life.

Flat earth started from YouTube recommendations. They had a whole non-annonymous conference where they were happy to talk to the guy from All Gas No Brakes on camera.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H110vCGvTmM

Pizzagate and QAnon started because many people understand something is fucked up but lack the correct tools to understand the systemic problems of society (of which you and I would probably disagree as I blame capitalism and imperialism) so they invent conspiracies to explain the world around them. In many cases, their conservative, libertarian, or liberal ideology does not permit them to critique the systems around them, so they must find some other way to explain the situation, which revolves around (non-system challenging) elite conspiracies. It's difficult to disabuse people of the fake conspiracies because real conspiracies against the public are routine. Some are boring (such as the SV conspiracy to depress software engineer wages). Some are exciting, such as what the CIA is publicly documented to have done overseas by selling cocaine to fund their black operations in the Iran-Contra scandal.

Also, there was a kernel of truth to Pizzagate and QAnon. Look at the Clinton's relationship to Jeffery Epstein. However, the right was unable to metabolize real existing issues and started fantasizing about a fascist coup executed by the president (whom they say rejected Epstein after he found out what he was up to... but didn't do anything about it). They make up concepts like he's tagging and bagging hollywood celebrities and subjecting them to military tribunals but replaced them with clones.

You can't beat a political problem with a technocratic solution, especially one that is proven not to work and that harms real people.

>Flat earth started from YouTube recommendations...

Yes but my point is that, if the flat earth videos were clearly marked a joke or fiction, there wouldn't be a heap of people who really believe it and show up for a conference.

My objective is not to solve a political problem, I'd like to be able to believe what I read on the internet, and for the people around me to have the same basic understanding of what is happening in the world. If that also solves political problems it would be nice too.

I think that would only have worked temporarily. Over time people would grow skeptical of labels. If there's anything that's a truism about the current environment, it's an earned distrust of elite opinion and a distrust of their attempts to characterize different viewpoints as unserious. It could even backfire as people want to watch what the controversy is about.

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