Yes, banning anonymity is dumb idea.
Also, opt-in authenticated identity is necessary.
It's ridiculous that bots, trolls, and sockpuppets are given the same esteem and protections as real people.
To curtail harassment, nerf the outrage machine (algorithmic newsfeeds) and ad revenue biz models.
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.
My point was more that bots are way more harmful than real people online, and any policy on online anonymity intended to "help" people should be focused almost entirely on bots, not people.
How to tell someone’s never worked on anti-abuse at scale
The problem with anti-abuse at scale isn't catching the 90-99%. It is the remaining 1%. Have 10M abuse accounts with a 99% success rate and you are left with 100k spam accounts. That, and making sure you aren't catching too many innocent customers in your efforts.
I take it as a given that Facebook, NSA, whomever, have uniquely identified every person, living and dead. I just don't understand how or why fake accounts are created.
Smaller outfits like metafilter need some kind of gatekeeper. Like require nominal fee or scan of ID or verification photo.
Strong disagree in that I think most of the problems people identify with FB are due to the collective actions of mostly real people in conversation.
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.
Yes and:
Nerfing could be as modest as dialing down virality. Like maybe a rate regulator.
IIRC, the velocity of rage posting is way greater than puppies and kittens. So just slow that crap down. Or just don't turbo boost it to big with.
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.
I believe but cannot prove than most targeted advertising is fraudulant. When whistleblowers leak those metrics, this might be a self correcting problem.
Meanwhile...
There are plenty of other ways to run a business.
metafilter, craigslist, ravelery.org, others do well, without harming their users.
I'm fine with bots if they're obviously bots. I think it was US Senator Mark Warner that proposed that reform.