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Online abuse: banning anonymous social media accounts is not the answer

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Re: Online abuse: banning anonymous social media accounts is not the answer

#61

Post by colpabar »

bell-cot wrote: post #56
colpabar wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's ridiculous that bots, trolls, and sockpuppets are given the same esteem and protections as real people. Agreed. I think any talk of the problems of online anonymity should be focused on bots first and foremost. From my understanding, it's pretty easy to detect like 90% of bot users. Can't we go after those instead? I don't really care that real people online can be mean anonymously, because at the end of the d…

While banning ~90% of the bots sounds pretty good to me - how long would it take the folks behind those now-banned bots to replace them, with new & "improved" & less easily detected bots?

Of course people will come back with more sophisticated bots, that's inevitable. That happens with everything: bad thing is happening, we figure out how to protect against bad thing, bad people figure out how to get past protection, rinse and repeat.

My point was more that bots are way more harmful than real people online, and any policy on online anonymity intended to "help" people should be focused almost entirely on bots, not people.

Re: Online abuse: banning anonymous social media accounts is not the answer

#62

Post by swayvil »

lexapro wrote: post #17
tlholaday wrote: post #6

moot (Chris Poole) Conjecture: bind anonymity to ephemerality for best results. Consider ten seconds persistence limit. Like short-term memory for the spoken word.

If anything, he has proven that it brings out the absolutely worst.

The freedom to do the worst is also the freedom to do the best. That is an unavoidable universal law.

Look at instances where the conversation is forced to respect conventional values.

It's death. Conformity and moronic mob-politics becomes the norm. So norm that you forget that there was anything better. (Reddit and Facebook are 2 notorious cases of this.)

4chan is sharp and smart. And infantile and vile. And sometimes it's hard to tell the difference. Which is only proper.

Re: Online abuse: banning anonymous social media accounts is not the answer

#63

Post by C19is20 »

woeirua wrote: post #48

The simplest solution here is to require users to present government recognized credentials when signing up for accounts. Users can then create pseudonymous accounts that preserve some notion of anonymity, but when they become abusive the user can then be held accountable in the real world. Any solution here needs to be gated by the courts though, otherwise it would be ripe for abuse in and of itself through doxxing.

Imagine the effects of a data breach, though.

Re: Online abuse: banning anonymous social media accounts is not the answer

#64

Post by anon22hdjsks »

bryan_w wrote: post #36

Not anonymity, but some method to ensure 1 "account" maps to exactly 1 person would go a long way to getting some sanity back. I don't care what you call yourself, as long as I'm sure you are a singular , real, person.

No thanks

Re: Online abuse: banning anonymous social media accounts is not the answer

#65

Post by Kafkish »

lionkor wrote: post #23

Anonymity is important because it allows you to have discussions purely based on the arguments and opinions, without the bias of who youre talking to. I often find myself having a wonderfully deep discussion with someone online, and when I eventually find out what they look like (etc), I often realize that they dont look as friendly, educated, etc as they are. Humans are really bad at this, and you will put people in…

I just discussed this with a bunch of my friends. If you're having a high level technical exchange with somebody that you don't know, then you find out that that other person is a female, you're really impressed, that a girl will be that good at this very technical topic.

If, OTOH, you find out that that other person is a black guy (assuming you're white), you go through one of two reactions: If you're opinion of blacks is low, then you're really impressed. If you don't particularly like blacks (read: racist), then you're disappointed, and slightly pissed off - that that other guy knows more than you do, or know so much about a very technical topic, when he belongs to a group that you've been told are not very bright.

Humans are interesting creatures in this regards. That's why the right to remain anonymous online should be a given.

Re: Online abuse: banning anonymous social media accounts is not the answer

#66

Post by colpabar »

formerly_proven wrote: post #40
chomp wrote: post #7

I don’t know… my Nextdoor group is pretty abusive to certain groups at times, and people post happily with their real life name and the rough area of where they live attached. Hate towards an individual person isn’t super common, but it happens. If this extrapolates, I can’t see removing anonymity doing much other than e.g. hurting LGBT groups online (imagine asking questions as a member of that group in a conservati…

> I can’t see removing anonymity doing much other than e.g. hurting LGBT groups online (imagine asking questions as a member of that group in a conservative community and forced to use your real name) Consider that this could be one of the motivations behind the push for things like this.

In all seriousness, do you really think that any current western government is anti-lgbt? Do you have any examples?

Re: Online abuse: banning anonymous social media accounts is not the answer

#68

Post by ChicagoBoy11 »

bell-cot wrote: post #56
colpabar wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's ridiculous that bots, trolls, and sockpuppets are given the same esteem and protections as real people. Agreed. I think any talk of the problems of online anonymity should be focused on bots first and foremost. From my understanding, it's pretty easy to detect like 90% of bot users. Can't we go after those instead? I don't really care that real people online can be mean anonymously, because at the end of the d…

While banning ~90% of the bots sounds pretty good to me - how long would it take the folks behind those now-banned bots to replace them, with new & "improved" & less easily detected bots?

Part of a sophisticated bot-banning operation is then trying your damned hardest to make it as hard as possible for the bot itself to detect that it's been detected. Dunno how actually successful those efforts are, but people try!!!

Re: Online abuse: banning anonymous social media accounts is not the answer

#69

Post by hatchnyc »

specialist wrote: post #28

No, there is no silver bullet. Yes, banning anonymity is dumb idea. Also, opt-in authenticated identity is necessary. It's ridiculous that bots, trolls, and sockpuppets are given the same esteem and protections as real people. To curtail harassment, nerf the outrage machine (algorithmic newsfeeds) and ad revenue biz models.

> nerf the outrage machine (algorithmic newsfeeds)

Yes, if my feed is composed entire of accounts I follow sorted by date descending, there is little to no opportunity nor incentive for bots to exist at all. Sure, our proverbial crazy uncle is still going to send out conspiracy theories to everyone in his contacts, but this has existed forever and never seemed to cause that much trouble compared to algorithmic newsfeeds.

Even if you include results from followed topics sorted by explicit upvotes, so long as there's none of these inferred engagement metrics used in ranking then the blast radius of a malicious account will be severely limited as it's a lot harder to game explicitly expressed user intent.

Re: Online abuse: banning anonymous social media accounts is not the answer

#70

Post by showerst »

babyblueblanket wrote: post #52
showerst wrote: post #39

Somewhat tangential to the article, but here's what I would like: A site like reddit, but you have to get your government ID verified when you sign up. You can still pick any alias you want, but mods see your location within, say, 100 miles. Imagine reddit with no bots, banning has consequences, and local subreddits can actually just be people who live there. The painful sign up flow makes that totally unreasonable,…

Do you trust a site like reddit to keep your government ID secure? I don't.

I was thinking more of a "verified by stripe" type flow. They just need a location and a hash that prevents multiple signups. I realize that's just moving the problem, but hey the whole idea is impractical anyway.
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