Former Reddit CEO Ellen Pao: The Trolls Are Winning the Battle for the Internet
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
Platforms need to take a stand and find a way reduce hate and abuse, or public opinion (and my own) will turn against support of privacy. If it turns out pseudonymity is fundamentally incompatible with safety of the abused online then I'll take the latter, but I'd rather search for a way to have both.
Platforms banning abusive subcommunities seems like a good start.
If it were easier to publicize scenarios where people are imprisoned, tortured, or killed for voicing their opinions online - I'm sure people would swiftly change their tune regarding privacy. I'm sure many of these cases are never heard of and kept hush-hush. Largely fearing that sharing such a story would mean "you're next".
>Platforms need to take a stand and find a way reduce hate and abuse
Prohibit the use of posting PII. No addresses, no names, no numbers, no contact information, not even your age. If nobody has information to threaten or intimidate you, it's less likely to occur or be credible. In other words, don't hand your potential future abusers a weapon to use against you.
Privacy is security online. If you give away your privacy - you give away your security. Even YouTube was aware of those only 4 years ago. [0]
"Protecting your privacy means you are taking care not to post personal information that could result in you being harmed over the internet." - Long forgotten and often ignored advice
Ironically, your advocacy for lack-of-privacy is exactly what would put people into more potential danger. First step to harming someone: knowing who they are to begin with.
Just a small note. I actually currently do support pseudonymity with the caveat that we need to find a way for it to exist non-hatefully. If Reddit, by shutting down problem communities or some other approach, manages to clean up their act while staying pseudonymous I will be very happy.
Incidentally I don't think your "total privacy" solution will work as we live more of our lives online. People will post PII. It's almost impossible for most people not to.
If I hand a criminal a gun and he shoots me, perhaps I should not have given him a gun? I don't defend the criminal for shooting me, that isn't right either, but it was preventable. I find it hard to emphasize with people who willingly choose to hand their abusers weapons to beat them. The choice was theirs and the outcome predictable.
There are people, like me, whom exist without a Facebook. Without a Twitter. Who post very little, or sometimes fabricated details, of their personal lives. We exist and function in society but have opted out of placing ourselves at risk by sharing our PII with the world. We refuse to give others a weapon. Not surprisingly, I never hear about an anonymous user being abused. It's always someone with a name. Someone with an identity. Someone who has provided people with something to attack.
People have nothing to attack about me but my opinions - and I'm always willing to defend my opinions; rather than asking my opinions not be attacked.
Oh, some of it is clear cut. But a few decades ago, a person arguing that if interracial couples should be allowed to marry then so should homosexual couples would have been seen as someone who was against homosexual couples. Just like someone who is pro-polygamy today is seen as being an attack on homosexuals for daring to compare loving homosexuals to the abusive relationships of non-consensual polygamy. (Yes, I clearly worded that last bit in a leading and emotionally charged way, which is to make a point of how people treat it online currently.)
Now, you could limit it to only abuse against a single person, like harassment, but to a large extent that is already illegal and I think we are clearly talking about larger ideals that are considered hateful.
Consider the argument that if you allow interracial marriage then you should have to allow homosexual marriage. In a culture where the norm is oppression of homosexuals, such a statement can be considered abusive to interracial couples and thus shouldn't be protected. But in our current culture, such a statement is seen as a good and right argument for marriage equality for all (with all being only the politically correct groups of all at this time, adding other groups may constitute abuse to existing groups).
Removing anonymity doesn't fix abuse, it just limits it to the socially acceptable abuse.