Comment by qwertox | Hacker News Reader

Comment by qwertox | Hacker News Reader

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Lately I'm repeatedly reminded of how in Ecuador citizens, when interviewed during a protest, see it as a normal thing to tell their name as well as their personal ID number into the camera when also speaking about their position in regards of the protest. They stand to what they are saying without hiding.

Since about half a year I've noticed the German Twitter section getting sunk in hate posts, people disrespecting each other, ranting about politicians or ways of thinking, but being really hateful. It's horrible. I've adblocked the "Trending" section away, because its the door to this horrible place where people don't have anything good to share anymore but disrespect and hate.

This made me think about what we're really in need for, at least here in Germany, is a Twitter alternative, where people register by using their eID and can only post by using their real name. Have something mean to say? Say it, but attach your name to it.

This anonymity in social media is really harming German society, at least as soon as politics are involved.

I don't know exactly how it is in the US but apparently it isn't as bad as here, at least judging from the trending topics in the US and skimming through the posts.

People have zero qualms about being absolute ghouls under their wallet names. The people with the most power in society don't need anonymity. The people with the least often can't safely express themselves without it.

Also:

https://theconversation.com/online-anonymity-study-found-sta...

>> "What matters, it seems, is not so much whether you are commenting anonymously, but whether you are invested in your persona and accountable for its behaviour in that particular forum. There seems to be value in enabling people to speak on forums without their comments being connected, via their real names, to other contexts. The online comment management company Disqus, in a similar vein, found that comments made under conditions of durable pseudonymity were rated by other users as having the highest quality. "

There are two points which matter:

- No more bots or fake propaganda accounts.

- Illegal content, such as insults or the like, will not get published. And if it does, it will have direct consequences.

I'm also not tending towards a requirement to have all social networks ID'd, but I think that a Twitter alternative which enables a more serious discussion should exist. A place where politicians and journalists or just citizens can post their content and get commented on it, without all that extreme toxicity from Twitter.

The thing is, the political climate is very toxic and the absence of anonymity can have a real impact for things that are basically wrong think.

Say for example I held the opinion that immigration threshold should be lower. No matter how many non-xenophobic justifications I can put on that opinion, my possibly on H1B colleagues can and would look up my opinion on your version of Twitter and it would have a real impact on my work life.

There is a reason why we hold voting in private, it's because when boiled down to its roots, there are principles that guide your opinions they are usually non -reconciliable with someone else's opinion and we preserve harmony by keeping everyone ignorant of their colleagues political opinions. It's not a bad system, but it's one that requires anonymity

Or, to post on a political forum you must have an ID. You can have and post from multiple accounts, but your id and all associated accounts can be penalized for bad behavior.

Plenty of hate under plain names on Facebook, been that way for a decade and I doubt it will change with ID verification.

The algorithm powering the trending section, which rewards angry replies and accusatory quote-tweets is at least a good a candidate as a source of harm to political discourse than anonymity.

Take it a step forward, ban Engagement based algorithmic feeds. I've said this and I'll continue to say this type of behavioral science was designed at FB by a small group of people and needs to be outlawed. It never should have been allowed to take over the new age monetization economy. There's so much human potential with the internet and its absolutely trainwrecked atm b.c of Facebook.

I agree.

It's been deliberately designed to cause strife. They are genuinely anti-human companies that seem to want conflict and tension to occur.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jun/30/facebo...

This article was very on-the-nose, that really should have been the writing on the wall.

I think this is a partial attribution error; the goal is to make money by capturing attention and selling it to advertisers. The fact that strife is one of the most effective ways to do so, and the companies appear utterly unconcerned about the resulting damage to society makes it look like strife is the end goal, but it is merely a means to make money.

They would change their algorithms immediately if large advertisers applied financial incentives. We've seen some of this with Youtube's policies leading to videos with censored profanity where its use was previously normal and neologisms like "unalived" to mean killed.

Musk's Twitter may be a partial exception since it's decisions are now driven by a single man's preferences rather than an amoral mechanistic imperative to increase shareholder value. That doesn't seem to have improved things.

> the goal is to make money by capturing attention and selling it to advertisers

I mean, how do you know that?

How do you know that the goal isn't actually to perform social engineering on a huge scale and that the advertising is just the way that goal is being funded?

I suppose I don't. It could be that Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and TikTok are all actively trying to create chaos, but greed adequately explains their behavior. One thing that points more strongly to greed is that the companies, aside from Twitter post-Musk, rapidly change their behavior when it impacts their revenue.

With TikTok, there's some chance geopolitics is a factor as well.

I wonder what percentage of the hate stuff is bots.

My experience with propaganda bots is that the really nasty hate stuff will usually be posted by actual, real people (perhaps as a result of being prodded by bot-provided outrage), and bots will rather have all kinds of more subtle hinting and agenda-pushing - because bots are managed by semi-professionals who care about bots not being blocked and (often) don't really care about the agenda they're pushing, while there also is a substantial minority of semi-crazy people who just don't care and will escalate from zero to Hitler in a few minutes.

Attach their pictures too, so you can see the ghoul spouting hate is a basement dweller

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