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> Yet anonymity/pseudonymity is incredibly valuable

> Just outlaw or intensely regulate these massive, centralized/proprietary social media algorithms

I feel like I'm seeing a pattern here, something like "Hey, it's not that simple. Your solution ignores important tradeoffs. So here's my simple solution that ignores different tradeoffs."

Basically I'm objecting to any use of the word "just" in thorny social issues like this. I think that all of this is hard and none of this is obvious.

I learned a few years ago to see (and hear) the word "just" as a red flag, whether used by others or myself. I do catch myself "just"ing sometimes, but always seek to restate the sentence without the word "just". It is reliably a clearer, more honest and expressive formulation, and provokes deeper consideration in both the listener and, importantly, the speaker.

(Just is an overloaded word with several definitions, some of which are fine - "a just decision", "it just happened" - I'm referring to its use in a dismissive, diminutive or disparaging sense.)

My other red flag words are "assume" and "trivial". As in "I just assumed it was trivial".

Hahaha that's very true! My bias against the front-ends of those services is showing. That still doesn't mean they don't need regulation though.

To elaborate, there is a world of difference between some smaller forum/board/chat network/webserver run by some random guy/girl in a community, and a multi-billion dollar public corporate entity hellbent on extracting every bit of value from every facet of your life that they possibly can. Either the fact that these companies can wield such enormous powers over the population, or the manner in which they do so, needs to see the light and society must decide on how they will restrain these actors.

I know that some people (ugh, yes... most people...) favor these media today as their means of communication, marketing, discourse, etc, but these corporations have gone way too far, and restricting the actual good things the internet brings like anonymity while ignoring the far more pressing evils of these unchecked capitalists is silly.

The internet can remain anonymous at large, but we could require any company with an audience larger than, say, 10k people to operate within the parameters Haidt describes. In other words, you can be completely anonymous if using small communities, but if you are operating within a platform so large that it has the power to influence the outcome of elections, we need to regulate whether or not you are actually human. And yes, we do need to make you accountable if you break laws in these platforms. I do value anonymity immensely, yet I see no other way around this hurdle. The solution you describe - simply banning Twitter, Facebook, etc. - is more damaging in my opinion.

Maybe more important than social justice is putting "just" on social ice?

I see a lot of terrible things on Facebook from people writing under their own names. I don't think anonymity is the entire problem.

Knowing what these companies do with any bit of data they can extract from you is plenty reason to object to KYC for all rules.

If anonymity is the sacrifice, I just won't partake in the discussion. It might reduce vitriol in discourse, but will do far more to quell debate when the cost is your career, relationships, etc.

I’ve implemented parts of KYC systems. It’s one component of what is essentially an outsourced surveillance mechanism. It is probably going to abused some day.

People want the government to have that power and to start inspecting and regulating speech so we can be more like China and we can fix the crisis of anonymous dissent and wrongthink? Oh well. I suppose it’s not really surprising.

> Just outlaw or intensely regulate these massive, centralized

You can even do this with mere taxation rather than needing the full power of regulation.

Graduated corporate income tax.

Instant diseconomy of scale. That's a good thing.

Except it's easy to break a corporation into many constituent parts. That's assuming there are any US based profits to tax. Most companies of a certain scale only make money in Ireland, the Netherlands and the Caymans.

> Except it's easy to break a corporation into many constituent parts.

Both the tax code as well as securities law already have something called "look-through" that deals with this.

To my understanding, that only works if the corporations are still owned by a master entity. It wouldn't do anything if, for instance, an apartment complex of 1,000 units was split into 1,000 corporations that paid a non-profit HOA, and each of the 1,000 corporations just happened to have the same ownership by natural persons.

> and each of the 1,000 corporations just happened to have the same ownership by natural persons.

That's called "common control". The tax code has been dealing with these shenanighans for decades:

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/26/1563

Instead of talking about the dangers of anonymity, I think we need to reframe the argument in terms of the dangers of social credit score. I don't mean dangers from authoritarians, of course. Everyone understands how the Chinese system is terrible, for instance. I mean the dangers of a "natural", "emergent" social credit score. The kind that you get for free when you attach a way to establish who is who to otherwise anonymous messaging.

It is a problem of trust.

Humans are very trusting. I don't mean this in the sense that we are naive, but rather that we perform an enormous amount of our decision making on beliefs whose veracity we have not established with experiment or argument or proof, but on the basis that someone who you trust believes it too.

This is a very convenient heuristic, as otherwise you probably wouldn't be willing to get on an airplane, but it has very serious implications when a wrong idea gets too much traction, and now suddenly everyone believes it only because everyone else believes it. What does this have to do with identity, you say? Well, if you don't know who said something, you don't know whether or not to trust it. No one (well, almost no one) trusts something just because it is written down somewhere. The aggregate amount of identity floating around is an upper bound on how much belief that can be created exclusively by the trust mechanism.

Moreover, trust is increasing. This is a little abstract, but if there is a belief that tends to only be expressed by the people I trust, and someone expresses that belief, I gain a little more trust in that person. I have added trust to the system. Note again that this would be impossible in a completely anonymous system.

One would hope that the breaking of trust was transitive in the same way that the gaining of trust is transitive. If I discover that you actually believe something wrong, or you want to hurt me, or any of the dozens of things that mean that I shouldn't trust you, then all of the things that I believe because you believed them get put back in the queue. These beliefs should have to be rejustified.

Unlike in the trust creation process though, this is essentially impossible. Not only do I have to go back and find out all the things that I believe because you believed them, but also find the things that I believe because someone else trusted you and I trusted them, and so forth. If the community is small enough, it is possible to regroup and redo the corrupted calculations, but the upper bound on that is obviously very low. Really the reason that trust can still survive is that the social penalties for lying from a highly trusted position are that you do not get to participate in the gains from trade that being so trusted provide. Again, if you are a doctor, you lose your entire livelihood if people do not trust you.

So there are two factors that influence whether an epistemological system of trust can survive the interference of trusted liars. The first is how rare trusted liars are, and the second is how much total trust there is in the system. A system which is trusting enough can be completely obliterated by even very rare trusted liars. If your community is the size of the internet, and as fundamentally predicated on trust as non-anonymous social media has become, then your entire system of belief (based on trust) functionally does not have a chain of custody. This is a crisis of epistemology. Any adversary capable of creating trusted liars is not going to find that they have much trouble doing so.

This brings me to my final point, which is that trust is valuable. It is the very basis of advertising, and they have even gotten bold enough to throw the curtain aside and brand themselves as "influencers". Trust can, and is, bought and sold on the open market. The more trusted you are, the more valuable your betrayal is. A doctor can make more than enough money appearing on talk shows for it to be worth trading their good will.

The devastation that the corruption of the trust mechanism has had on the aggregate belief system has been profound. I think you will struggle to find a belief that is held by less than 20% of people.

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Ultimately, two things are required. One is to pull an immediate 180 on internet "trustworthiness". Increasing aggregate trust is a catastrophe greater than global warming. Move to anonymous or pseudonymous boards immediately and never look back except in grave, well explained warnings of what lies that way. The second is that we must work towards reducing our reliance on trust as a mechanism entirely. This is exactly the opposite of what is taught in school, so I suppose it too relies on our capacity to perform a complete 180.

Even mathematics, THE constructive epistemology, is taught as a bunch of algorithms that you are expected to trust. For most people, even including those who take math in college, this is the only exposure to mathematics that they will ever have.

Science, likewise, is taught as a collection of facts, rather than the process by which those facts were obtained. Perhaps the only non-trust based epistemology that I encountered in my (pre-collegiate) education was in computer science. The-computer-does-what-you-tell-it-to is a pretty profound starting point. It certainly changed my life. I can't imagine that K-12 CS programs haven't been utterly neutered by the education system at this point, but hopefully, you can't bureaucracy away their main feature. It's a chink in the armor at least.

> Move to anonymous or pseudonymous boards immediately and never look back except in grave,

To accomplish what you describe here, you need to go beyond "anonymous" and "pseudonumous" boards, to completely untagged boards. You don't know me, but you (can come to know) my moniker "PaulDavisThe1st". This is just as much of an identity to build trust upon as whatever may actual name is.

I think the wholesale abolition of identity is probably too unpopular to be viable, and that the goal is accomplished with a sufficient reduction of identity. What counts as sufficient is anyone's guess, and probably too important to be left up to guesses, but I suspect that not allowing you to link an actual identity to the thing sufficiently dampens trust as to be sufficient.

If all you're risking is your karma by being outed as a deceiver, that's probably not enough for someone to trust that this is sufficient incentive to keep you honest. By extension, they no longer trust what you write.

That said, what you mean by untagged is what I meant by anonymous.

It's a tough nut to crack. There is genuine utility in being able to follow the respondents in a thread like this. I'm responding to u/ouid but will the next reply to this be from u/ouid or someone new who hasn't been a part of the conversation until now? This alters the dynamic of how the conversation continues to flow.

Of course, once you place a tag of any kind on someone's posts, you can begin to build a profile that destroys any anonimity. Perhaps a randomly generated number that persists in this article's comments but resets to something new on the next one? That gets unwieldy in a hurry and probably still allows the site operator to build a profile.

As regards mathematics, if you are willing to endure the proof then relying on the algorithm as a mechanism of trust is not required.

Physics is mostly the same. But kind of not

> running servers or at least using infrastructure run by fellow human beings, rather than consuming content from a handful of global feeds susceptible to these social Sybil attacks.

Basically nobody used the internet for social interaction back then. Now that nearly everyone has the internet[0] and we've experienced a large shift of social interactions moving to tiktok/snapchat/twitter/FB, we have to deal with misinformation campaigns by overseas operatives[1]. Now, instead of some government-sanctioned KYC requirement (that would hopefully put more safeguards in to prevent the large social media companies from using it for anything other than verification), we have Twitter using phone numbers as the de-facto standard; this increases the cost of creating tons of fake accounts, but who knows how much more they'll ask for in 2024.

0: https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/internet-bro...

1: https://misinforeview.hks.harvard.edu/article/russian-disinf... (better than the multitude of articles about it imo)

> we have to deal with misinformation campaigns by overseas operatives

Don’t forget the misinformation campaigns by our own intelligence agencies! They’ve been practicing for like 60-70 years so they’re pretty good at it.