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Comment by yc-kraln | Hacker News Reader

Real name policy destroys Twitter the way the no-pornography rules destroyed tumblr. It's a position from a place of privilege and is actively harmful, but don't take my word for it, here is a link to the EFF's position: https://www.eff.org/de/issues/anonymity

Which is besides the point; why do you think Elon will do any of this, when the previous board/company/ownershop did not?

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Musk has indicated that he will do a pay-for blue checkmark.

Right now having a verified account is a form of privilege were you pleased some sort of twitter corporate representative who decides these sorts of thing. They have a history of giving blue check marks to accounts they agree with and taking it away from verified people they disagree with.

By handing out checkmarks to anybody willing to pay them for it (and by extension tying their legal identity to their twitter one) then it neutralizes the political aspect of verified accounts while improving a revenue stream.

The revenue stream would improve in more ways than one.

Turns out knowing a person's browsing history and what accounts they have online is not really that useful or interesting to advertisers. It's not a big money maker.

However if you can tie financial identities into online identities then that is vastly more interesting and is something advertisers are willing to pay for.

This is why Facebook insists on having "real identities" nowadays when people sign up. They partner with other data mining operations and tie people's financial history into their facebook accounts. This way adverisers know people's buying habits, income levels.

Pretty much everything you fill out for drivers licensing, hunting licenses, loan application, credit card history, debit card history, mortgage applications, etc etc.. is now tied to your Facebook account if they can figure out to connect the dots. Which isn't that hard for most people.

> By handing out checkmarks to anybody willing to pay them for it (and by extension tying their legal identity to their twitter one) then it neutralizes the political aspect of verified accounts while improving a revenue stream.

I don't think that extends in the fashion you believe it does. It's like the HashCash solution for email. It was never employed because it probably didn't work, it just made spamming more expensive but didn't eliminate spam. The current walled-garden state of email has also made spam very expensive, but email spam persists to this day.

Ability to pay for something online also does not indicate actual identity. It's trivial to get an anonymous Visa number, and so on.

If you are dealing with individuals that know and care enough to circumvent the tracking built into our financial system then that is also probably not a person that advertisers are very interested in.

Not only because it is an incredibly niche market, but probably because they don't see the advertisements in the first place.

We are talking about people trying to figure out how to extract money from tracking and documenting the great unwashed masses. The hyper tech freaks can abandon these platforms en masse and it wouldn't amount too much more than a rounding error.

Remember:

The purpose of Twitter and Facebook and other social media sites, including Reddit, is to provide services to people willing to pay to disseminate propaganda. Primarily in the form of advertisements.

The platform for discussions and content is not the product. The product is the people that use the platform. Anything they can do to improve the quality of the product, ie information about the users, can increase revenue.

Comparing to email doesn't make sense. Also Email is such a garbage protocol nowadays that it is much more profitable to prolong its brokenness than actually solve its problems.

> Musk has indicated that he will do a pay-for blue checkmark.

Please fact check me because who knows where they finally landed on this but at one point Elon Musk backtracked on the blue checkmark in favor of a different symbol for a paid account (iirc down to USD 2 from USD 3 and different amounts for different countries).

Cynically speaking : Twitter is a useful tool for broadcasting the ruling class' narrative and pass it off as the mainstream one - as long as this function is not too apparent. Yielding to Musk's requests would be a clever way for the platform to regain some credit with non-elites and unbelievers.

Musk is a multi billionaire whose companies reap billions in government subsidies. He is a part of the ruling class.

Precisely. I don't think he intend to rock the boat too deeply - just enough to appear to stick to his personal brand.

I am cautiously optimistic of this deal, but the cynic in me also thinks that the same broadcasting of the ruling class' narrative will continue, now under the guise of "Elon defeated the bad guys". Same hands, different puppet.

First sentence of your linked article: Many people don't want the things they say online to be connected with their offline identities.

I do 100% agree. Sadly, I don't think it'll be possible to stay anonymous in the future. Not because of credentials or personal data, but the things we say and the way we say them online. These things will be enough to link personal accounts and alt-accounts. Sure, you can obscure and keep quiet about things, but what's the point then anyways?

Disagree. AI text generation is going to ruin stylometric analysis as anonymous online communities get spammed by ever increasing amounts of automated content based on inputs learned from random subsets of users. A good, helpful AI generation bot is an easy way to harvest up-votes on content platforms like Reddit or HN and subsequently manipulate content.

good point and I agree with the effect, but I'm not sure about the scope. I'm not sure if it will be enough noice to equalize it.

Something else that comes to my mind: Lot of people on HN (me included) share rather personal stuff here. Everything I ever said with this account should (in theory) fall in a consistent picture. But those bots are not there to mimic that. They have other purposes (some of which you already mentioned).

>Not because of credentials or personal data, but the things we say and the way we say them online. These things will be enough to link personal accounts and alt-accounts.

Are you basing this on writing-style analysis?

yes and more. Not only form, but also content.

> It's a position from a place of privilege and is actively harmful

The rest of this post makes sense but what is this supposed to mean? How is using real names "a position of privilege"? Does this just mean that some people's name is more influential than others? In which case, renaming "influence" into "a position of privilege" to attach to SJW ethos to something completely unrelated is double-plus ungood.

It's not about influence.

To take an example from a sibling thread: If you live in Turkey and write negative about Erdogan you get charged with terrorism. It's something people can only afford to do if they are reasonably sure they will not be identified and I think we can agree a real name policy makes this rather hard. So, if you ask for a real name policy you ask for a policy which not everyone can afford to adhere here to. You probably[1] can, so it's a privilege you have, others don't have. Therefore, written from a place of privilege.

[1] If someone asks for a real name policy while not being able to adhere to it (without dire consequences for themselves) they don't write from a position of privilege, but imho that's a rather academic case.

I don’t know what the original commenter meant, but a simple example is that tweeting (or following) things that I believe in while using my real name could cause a lot of issues to me an my family in my home country (even if I live abroad) So, in this case it’s a privilege of living and being born in a place with decent democracy.

Also, in my view, no democracy is safe, things can change in any country and I wouldn’t want a history of things that can be linked to me so easily. I am pessimistic coming from a place I did. Check marked people at least have money and connections to navigate those issues.

I am sure there are more examples. I think it was a valid statement.

Identity validation doesn't mean public real name. It means that Twitter has my real name so I want to create 1,000 spam accounts, it can internally see they're all one person. They could then trivially enforce a per-identity account limit, prevent trolls from re-signing up a thousand times, etc.

I don't buy this. If people want to make the argument that Twitter is the new public square then we need real identities. No one in an actual public square is going to get away with spouting bigotry precisely because there are consequences to free speech which require identifiability.

I agree that a real-name policy would help prevent hate and abuse on the platform (though not at all eradicate it). But I absolutely don't think Musk will do that. He'll either do nothing, best case, or worst case make moves that help misinformation, hate speech, and abuse spread.

I’m fine with Twitter knowing my identity if I can keep my account publicly anonymous … for the reasons stated in the linked article. Seems like a good balance.

I think there's a chance that there's some amount of intrinsic tension here; i.e. that if you want to hold people to account for spreading lies; then you'll be similarly enabling dunking on minorities. But dis+misinformation are so problematic that I don't think we should immediately disregard an idea merely because it has some potential collateral damage - especially if a pragmatic approach might exist that at least tries to minimize that collateral damage.

However, while accountability might have worked 50 years ago it sure looks like it wouldn't anymore - it's not as if people, including prominent people actually go to the effort to hide their identity before spouting nonsense - some of it fairly vile, some of it so idiotic it surely would have caused reputational harm a few decades ago.

Real names won't work where there's no sense of shared reproach; no sense by the speaker that their friends will be disappointed or even outraged. Worse, they revel in it; being crazy is a point of pride; as is harassing others (made even easier should a real-name policy be adopted).

So whether or not anonymity for the oppressed is worthy enough aim to accept also supporting yet more disinformation campaigns is probably a moot point; real names will no longer discourage extremists from spreading their special brand of insanity.

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