I do not believe humans are capable of responsibly wielding the power to anonymously connect with millions of people without the real weight of social consequence.
If someone I was friends with made racist remarks, they wouldn't be prosecuted for that. But I would stop being their friend. Similarly if I was the only one in my friend group against racism and advocate firefly against it, they would probably stop being my friends.
So you want your friend to be able to anonymously express their racism while being able to hide it from you? I can't imagine advocating for that as a desired goal rather than a negative side effect.
>Similarly if I was the only one in my friend group against racism and advocate firefly against it, they would probably stop being my friends.
If we are talking about a society level problem, I think it is a little silly to think a society as toxic as this hypothetical one could be saved by anonymous internet posting.
For the record, I'm not as against anonymous posting as the person who started this specific comment thread, I just think this line of argument is advocating for a band-aid over bigger issues.
How do we solve those bigger issues when we live in an emperor's new clothes society? Wait for children who haven't learnt the rules to point them out?
this sounds like a suspicious characterisation - how are they trying to undo systemic racism, and what do they identify as "systemic racism"?
For example, "Ended race-based waitlists" (for healthcare).
Trying to correct an inequality with another inequality is still discrimination. People who want that should be honest and identify themselves as racists, not the ones who want to stop racism.
Trying to correct historical inequalities isn't an obvious case of "racism".
Maybe a more convincing example is that if I advocate for making it easier to build housing because that will lower the cost of housing and many of my friends are homeowners, they might really not like me because lowering the cost of housing directly lowers their net worth.
Are these people evil for not wanting to lose their retirement savings (wrapped up in their home)?
Edit: also
> So you want your friend to be able to anonymously express their racism while being able to hide it from you?
While on the specific example of racism I'm pretty convinced of my moral correctness, I am not bold enough to declare that every bit of my worldview is the universally correct one. I am also not so bold to say that I will always be instantly convinced of my incorrectnes by a friend challenging my worldview (if they actually do have a better stance on some thing). My conclusion is that my friend should have some place to platform his better opinion without (having to fear) alienating me. And the only way to achieve this as far as I know is anonymous platforms.
Deceit is a characteristic of our humanity. We all deceive others and ourselves. If people are to be allowed to be fully expressive as humans they need to be able to deceive. And so they require anonymity.
See Robert Trivers' works
It's unclear that it's true. I think the implication is deceit is a human characteristic because all humans do it, perhaps even subconsciously; Is the same true of murder?
What people these days are worried about isn't that they are racist and have no outlets for their racism. It's that they worry that whatever they say will be reinterpreted as racism when they were making an honest attempt to not be racist.
So you agree with my point that people could face social prosecution for dissenting (even when they are correct), so we should have anonymous platforms where they can champion their ideas.
> Your case doesn't sound reasonable and it also doesn't fit the current zeitgeist.
These were just extreme examples to indicate that there can be social repercussions to dissenting.
Maybe a more convincing example is that if I advocate for making it easier to build housing because that will lower the cost of housing and many of my friends are homeowners, they might really not like me because lowering the cost of housing directly lowers their net worth.
The rational tolerant society you imagine is so far fetched we don't even pretend it can exist even in fantasies.
Chilling the discourse would be a feature, not a bug. In fact what discourse in most places these days needs is a reduction in temperature.
This kind of defence of anonymity is grounded in the anthropologically questionable assumption that when you are anonymous you are "who you really are" and when you face consequences for what you say you don't. But the reality is, we're socialized beings and anonymity tends to turn people into mini-sociopaths. I have many times, in particular when I was younger said things online behind anonymity that were stupid, incorrect, more callous, more immoral than I would have ever face-to-face.
And that's not because that's what I really believed in any meaningful sense, it's because you often destroy any natural inhibition to behave like a well-adjusted human through anonymity and a screen. In fact even just the screen is enough when you look at what people post with their name attached, only to be fired the next day.
To be clear, I think freedom of speech is a bedrock foundation of intellectual society and should be the starting point for modern societies.
But perhaps we really should outlaw anonymity when it comes to expression. Allow people to express themselves, but it shouldn't emanate from the void.
If anything, the ones where people have attached their names tend to be a bit more extreme. Maybe attaching your name to something makes it feel more important to signal what group you're in.
I'd argue if all it took was people saying some mean things anonymously to change your opinion, then your convictions weren't very strong to begin with.
I disagree with "just as readily" (i.e. most of the most heinous things are indeed bots or trolls).
Also, I imagine that without the huge amount of bots and anonymous trolls, the real-name-accounts would not post as they do now - both because their opinions are shaped by the bots AND because the bots give them the sense that many more people agree with them.
See examples like finding someone's employer on LinkedIn to "out" the employee's objectionable behavior, doxxing, or to the extreme, SWATing, etc.
I would replace "it doesn't help a bit" with "it doesn't solve the problem". My casual browsing experience is that X is much more intense / extreme than Facebook.
Of course, the bigger problem is the algorithm - if the extreme is always pushed to the top, then it doesn't matter if it's 1% or 0.001% - the a big enough pool, you only see extremes.
"The algorithm" is going to give you more of what you engage with, and when it comes to sponsored content, it's going to give you the sponsored content you're most likely to engage with too.
I'd argue that, while advertising has probably increased the number of people posting stuff online explicitly designed to try and generate revenue for themselves, that type of content's been around since much earlier.
Heck, look at Reddit or 4chan: they're not sharing revenue with users and I'd say they're at least not without their own content problems.
I'm not sure there's a convincing gap between what users "want" and what they actually engage with organically.
Social interaction is integrated with our brain chemistry at a very fundamental level. It's a situation we've been adapting to for a million years. We have evolved systems for telling us when its time to disengage, and anybody who gets their revenue from advertising has an incentive to interfere with those systems.
The downsides of social media: the radicalization, the disinformation, the echo chambers... These problems are ancient and humans are equipped to deal with them to a certain degree. What's insidious about ad-based social media is that the profit motive has driven the platforms to find ways to anesthetize the parts of us that would interfere with their business model, and it just so happens that those are the same parts that we've been relying on to address these evils back when "social media" was shouting into an intersection from a soap box.
I'm certainly not going to disagree with the notion that ad-based revenue adds a negative tilt to all this, but I think any platforms that tries to give users what they want will end up in a similar place regardless of the revenue model.
The "best" compromise is to give people what they ask for (eg: you manually select interests and nothing suggests you other content), but to me, that's only the same system on a slower path: better but still broken.
But anyway, I think we broadly are in agreement.
Tell me now will ya, who will effect "the real weight of social consequence" over anonymous 1-to-1M connections, other than other humans, the same kind that by your premise are not "capable of responsibly wielding [...] power" over such things?
(Or are there multiple kinds? Eh?)
Would "the real weight of social consequence" work the way you want it to when embodied by a commission? When codified by law? In the form a bot? As crowd? A corp? Me? Nah, you of course.
It's ever telling how the legitimacy of millions of strangers being able to decide the fate of any one individual is hardly ever called into question - only ever the ability of one to talk back.
"I was totally in favor of freedom, until one bad thing happened, and now I think freedom should never have existed in the first place!"
I believe that social dynamics like shame and consequences are disabled by pseudo-anonymzation. Pretty much the same effect as people becoming more aggressive and vocal in the confines of their cars. You'd never flip off random people in a supermarket as some would do for getting cut off in traffic.
This substack posts a few interesting theories and ideas how that comes to be. However, the most concerning to me is the asymmetric impact of emotional manipulation due to social media enabled network dynamics.
In particular:
> Online discussions are dominated by a surprisingly small, extremely vocal, and non-representative minority. Research on social media has found that, while only 3% of active accounts are toxic, they produce 33% of all content. Furthermore, 74% of all online conflicts are started in just 1% of communities, and 0.1% of users shared 80% of fake news. Not only does this extreme minority stir discontent, spread misinformation, and spark outrage online, they also bias the meta-perceptions of most users who passively “lurk” online.
The brain responds to alarmist, negative and distressing information with much higher priority. At the same time, very few radical and extreme influencers can utilize this mechanism, amplified by social media trying to boost ad revenue. Counterfactual information which directly appeals to the biases and psychology of users is posted and wrapped into click-baity designs to maximize attention and revenue. Tribes are forming and very few elite users can steer the information consumption of users - not just what but also how.
This is highly damaging to society and there is no more institutional trust anywhere to retrieve reliable information on which discussions can be based. Everyone selectively chooses their "reliable sources". This is the absolute opposite of how PKI works, it's like everyone just picks the Root Certs they like (for us techies).
This is of course ironic because all studies and knowledge humanity has to offer are a single search prompt away. But it simply doesn't matter if institutional trust is gone and studies are dismissed because they are coming from "woke" or "radical right wing" sources - completely obliterating what we are trying to achieve with peer review and so on.
Absolutist positions without nuance are the norm, and the folks who control these platforms control to a very large extent the narrative to push surrounding them, both directly through the platforms themselves and indirectly through lobbying and the obscene pool of capital they have siphoned off.
[0] One of the pieces of telemetry is the addresses abusing the server.
[1] I, and many other operators violate this stability requirement and drop traffic. [2]
[2] There are no internet police. If there were then BCP 38 would be enforced and this particular problem would largely go away.
Anonymity is necessary sometimes in my opinion.
Disclosing names wouldn’t help. People actually knowing the person would help.
The problem is the leaders of the large social media organizations do not care about the consequences of their platforms enough to change how they operate. They're fine with hosting extremist and offensive content, and allowing extremists to build large followings using their platforms. Heck, they even encourage it!
Anonymity can be very powerful for marginalised groups and it can be abused by trolls. Its value is contextual and not some simple good/bad dichotomy.
Successfully integrating technology into society is, like most political topics, complicated, requires a nuanced understanding of issues and a willingness to find compromise and less than perfect solutions. Sadly the political system (and the side in power now particularly) is increasingly offering moral absolutes and simplifications.
Or better yet, we need some kind some zero knowledge doodad which enforces scarcity of anonymous handles such that a given voice is provably a member of your same congressional district, or state, or zip code, or whatever, and is known to not be spinning up new identities all willy nilly like, but can't be identified more precisely than that.
I’m not sure, given the moral dystopia we currently inhabit, what positive benefit would accrue from removing online anonymity?