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Comment by saasaccount2 | Hacker News Reader

totally agree, cyber-bullying is mostly due to anonymity, and technology is well developed, and hackers find their way to do heinous acts and hide behind, this type of abuse cannot simply be prevented by banning social media, the cause is deep within the society's roots.

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The actual solution is to limit your social media use unless you want to be subject to abuse.

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.

Why should you have to shut yourself away from a large section of modern daily life just to not be the subject of abuse? Why is not even an option to work to fix the abuse?

The technology isn’t the problem, it’s us. Our primitive instincts just aren’t compatible to deal with such big groups of other people anonymous or not.

Because the platforms themselves make more money when there's rampant abuse. Facebook is largely profitable since super users are enraged and engaged.

If you're scrolling mindlessly consuming content which keeps drawing you in you're more likely to click on an ad for some new toothpaste.

> Why is not even an option to work to fix the abuse?

It is difficult for even human judges to clearly define what counts as abuse and what doesn't. Automated algorithms (or manual reviews) will be much worse, most likely.

Wouldn’t that be more easily achieved by building in some limits? Not sure how it’d look.

I agree. If people lack the emotional intelligence to realise when it is time to stop a conversation ( in real life and on social media), then they are simply being infantile by asking government or tech companies to do it for you. The block/ignore buttons are there for a reason.

My bullies were very public in their bullying. Bullies don’t care if it is public.

Soooo your solution is to dox yourself and everyone else, even to those who you are not affiliated with or are not on a platform you're involved with?

> totally agree, cyber-bullying is mostly due to anonymity

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

Not really on the anonymity front. I worked for an anti bullying children's charity back in the late noughties and we found that online bullying was often a continuation of real life bullying, and that kids who bullied online (and were generally trollish) were the same kids who did it in real life. Anonymity certainly didn't help a lot of the time, but it wasn't the cause.

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