Twitter has a fundamental problem Facebook solved years ago

You know who loses when a "real" names policy is enforced? Native Americans, domestic abuse survivors, anyone who wants to express a political opinion without risking their job (or in some countries, their life), people asking intimate questions about sex, and many more.

You know who wins? Data brokers who want to buy your data from Facebook.

Provide me with evidence that using a "fake" name makes you more likely to cause abuse, and I'll eat these words.

Facebook recently came under fire explicitly for their real name policy. Actually, they come under fire a lot for this, we just kinda forget about it until someone new decides to make an issue of it.

Anonymity is very useful to a certain kind of person, those whom individuals, call them criminals, are motivated to attack. But bullies themselves will use the tools of anonymity to ply their trade with impunity.

You can't have it both ways. If you need anonymity, your only recourse is to stay off of Facebook. Plenty of people have tried to keep their anonymity on Facebook, only to get outed by their huge data engine.

I would love to be able to find a happy medium, but at present it doesn't look like there is one. There's some hope that pseudonymity can give people the best of both worlds, but unfortunately does not protect against bullies.

The difference I can see is that bullies are unmotivated negative users, that simply need dissuasion from doing what they would otherwise do naturally, whereas the people that truly need anonymity need protection against motivated negative users, criminals, who will find a way to attack the person they want to attack regardless of policy. I can't imagine a policy that can usefully protect against both types of bad actors. Maybe there is one, I dunno. But vilifying the social networks themselves is definitely not the solution. We don't have any idea what they should be doing, so it's unhelpful to lump more hatred onto them.

I'm sure plenty of "regular" people (i.e. non-celebrities) would verify themselves for the blue check mark. To date it's been reserved for select users and gained a value on Twitter. They could capitalize on that here very easily.

E: typo.

From the cited Kick It Out study:

    As Facebook has the highest number of gated profiles, the amount of authors
    tracked from that network is significantly lower than Twitter.

I almost wonder if there's some stealth advertising here in that "Twitter is 88% better than Facebook at giving your product social media exposure."

Also, when did "troll" come to mean saying something negative? It used to be for people intentionally starting arguments for the sake of being argumentative. But now it's become a generic way to nullify an opinion you don't like by saying "you're a troll" to anyone who disagrees with you.

I use my real name on twitter. I also use my real face. If I could check a box that basically said 'filter out anyone not doing the same', Twitter would be a much kinder place from my perspective.

If not that, I would even take a filter that cut out all accounts less than a certain age (not user age, I'm talking about account creation date). Most of the trolls are on brand new accounts that are a few hours/days old, and have few followers.

"Don't feed the trolls" puts the onus on the victim to constrain their reactions after being trolled. But "don't give the trolls any attention" is very workable. If I don't hear/see the trolls, then they may as well not exist. I think knowing that you are not actually trolling anyone will reduce a lot of the trolling.

Oh boy here we go. Anybody who's ever followed a Drudge link to a news site that uses Facebook comments knows that isn't true.

The Internet is inherently toxic. Right now we're all like Marie Curie fascinated by this glowing thing we found but eventually we'll figure out that although you can do amazing things with it prolonged exposure will kill you.

On facebook, there are two modes of creating your presence - personal page and business page. You have choice to approve or reject new friend request or kick an existing friend if s\he is causing any trouble. I don't have official data about trolls on business pages but I am sure it exists there.

Contrary to this, on twitter anyone can start following you and wage a war against you. You can unfollow your followers but how many you will do?

To avoid any harassment on twitter either users can share their tweets only with their particular lists or have a moderation on who is following them.

I could be an asshole online with my real name and have no problems. I learned early however that if you cause the right amount of trouble, the internet connection is turned off.

As a correlary, now that they are public, which is more important to Twitter: user growth metrics or growth in meaningful engagement on the platform?

This is just going to be another system abused to shut one group of people up while another group does the same shit with impunity. The evidence is all there. Just recently I saw an argument about this on "The Mary Sue" where one person demanded proof that the other side of an Internet flame war was also getting death threats. When it was proven, the person declared that because the death threats against these people were not the result of oppression, they mattered less, and talking about them was "derailing the discussion." This is about ideology, not about a general concern for human safety. Some people being harassed don't count.

And this is the reason of stalled growing of the platform. Anom users is a recipe for disaster.