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Comment by colpabar | Hacker News Reader

>It's ridiculous that bots, trolls, and sockpuppets are given the same esteem and protections as real people.

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.

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> 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.

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.

> it's pretty easy to detect like 90% of bot users

How to tell someone’s never worked on anti-abuse at scale

That's unfair. I was in charge of anti-abuse for a dating site with millions of users and my gut reaction was "just 90%?".

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.

Why is it hard? I have some experience with demographic databases.

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.

While banning ~90% of the bots sounds pretty good to me - how long would it take the folks behind those now-banned bots to replace them, with new & "improved" & less easily detected bots?

Of course people will come back with more sophisticated bots, that's inevitable. That happens with everything: bad thing is happening, we figure out how to protect against bad thing, bad people figure out how to get past protection, rinse and repeat.

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.

Part of a sophisticated bot-banning operation is then trying your damned hardest to make it as hard as possible for the bot itself to detect that it's been detected. Dunno how actually successful those efforts are, but people try!!!

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