Online abuse: banning anonymous social media accounts is not the answer

I have regularly wiped my Reddit account, come back for a bit, notes the toxicity and blatant bias and wiped it again.

Within my circle of friends I no longer really discuss current events or politics. Once a pastime of challenging our beliefs and opinions has kinda just….stopped. And most are pretty moderate and more just burned out from the toxicity of others that we prefer not to engage it even in a relatively “safe” quarters because well, even some of our peers that traditionally have been level headed are less so and you never know who you will offend now.

For the most part I really only pull information now from RSS feeds. I no longer even seek out discussion. I just try and get a high level overview and call it good.

There’s a part of me that wants to discuss these things. But yeah, many are just over the top. I was discussing daycares with some colleagues at work over the “water cooler” and where we sent our kids. I mentioned the one we used because someone asked how it was. I gave them a rundown of my experience and someone else said the owners were “deplorable” and “advertised on xyz radio” and they were probably brain washing my….get it…3 year old. I told them I’m not huge on applying politics where it’s irrelevant if it’s not affecting the product. And that was it, everything went cold, and I ended up getting asked by my boss what I said.

My kids are not even aware there are other people in this world with the same name yet, and I offended someone by just mentioning a daycare center. And it’s a death by a thousand cuts, I’ll just pull back more I suppose.

"democratization" does not exist in social media. Algorithms designed to maximize profit rule what people read and watch. It's not a meritocracy, and you even can buy credibility of you want. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dum0bqWfiGw)

So, be careful on thinking that no rules means that everybody has the same opportunities.

I've seen this with Diversity and Inclusion.

You can't openly be against it or suggest that the bar was lowered for someone. So instead it's discussed behind closed doors, and you hear things like "You know X is here for the right reasons. He went to Y and is Asian so you know he's qualified".

Else you end up like the cancelled MIT lecturer.

Social media companies are fiefdoms whose real customers are other companies and individuals with large piles of money that want to use it to sway public opinion for profit or power.

YouTube et al. had no problem taking plenty of Mercer money to promote things like Brexit and other content that shifts focus away from those in power to other working class individuals. All someone with enough money has to do is pay to run promoted content on the platforms and it will be disseminated instantly to billions of eyeballs.

Social media platform owners and operators regularly remove content that might rock the boat. They already know that governments will pull the kill switch on them should real unrest happen, because it's happened countless times before. That's bad for revenue, so they play ball with people in power.

Meanwhile, the enlightenment was specifically when a wide variety of viewpoints started getting published.

I know that this is very unpopular opinion but there are very few cases where anonymity is useful. The rest is mostly useful for the abusive ones.

Instead of banning people and removing content, I would prefer losing anonymity.

I actually think that we can have the best of both worlds. What if we remain anonymous to the discussion parties but guaranteed linked identity to the systems that host us? If someone does something very bad, the identity could be revealed, i.e. doxxed. This way, many can self watch their behavior and remain anonymous.

So when the time comes and you post something objectionable or the mods flag you, the system can present you the option to remove your last post and lock your account OR override the mods, keep the content and reveal your identity.

It’s a shame that the current norm of dealing with people on the internet is to remove their content and lock them out. In my opinion, everyone should be guaranteed right to speak. If the the thing they do is illegal, punish them through the legal system but don’t silence them.

There are pros and cons. Simply pointing out pros is not enough to win the day.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

Consider that this could be one of the motivations behind the push for things like this.

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.

>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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Indeed. There has been quite a bit of discussion in the UK about the lax sentences given to people posting racist comments on social media. The platforms don't seem to take these issues seriously and the courts don't seem to either.

Prisoner's dilemma is altered when it's a repeated trust action.

haha I feel the bias like when I get a downvote "what did I do wrong, conform". I'm not denying intelligence/facts and also I think it's "this is not Reddit" kind of thing.

What I can't figure out is how you would do this while staying anonymous. If the users had some private key they could sign the account in some way to claim ownership without saying who they are, but then who issues and maintains the private keys? You'd need some large body to issue them, and that means storing personal data to know who has and hasn't been issued a key.

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 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.

That isn't the conclusion of the article at all. No one was proposing banning social media either.