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Online abuse: banning anonymous social media accounts is not the answer
121–130 of 297 posts
Re: Online abuse: banning anonymous social media accounts is not the answer
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
The conversation didn’t start with that. The conversation started with widespread abuse online originating from anonymous accounts. Communities without abuse problems never even float the idea of banning anonymity. One reason being it’s extremely expensive to do that if not effectively impossible.
The conversation here, I believe, refers to the posting of this link, and the replies to it.
Then wouldn't you say THIS conversation started saying we shouldn't ban anonymous accounts?
Re: Online abuse: banning anonymous social media accounts is not the answer
#123Anonymity 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…
Anonymity can enable that but it also enables far nastier things. There are pros and cons. Simply pointing out pros is not enough to win the day.
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Re: Online abuse: banning anonymous social media accounts is not the answer
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
When the conversation starts with, "Let's ban anonymous accounts!", then enumerating points in favor of anonymous accounts is the right response.
The conversation didn’t start with that. The conversation started with widespread abuse online originating from anonymous accounts. Communities without abuse problems never even float the idea of banning anonymity. One reason being it’s extremely expensive to do that if not effectively impossible.
Wasn’t there evidence that anonymity doesn’t actually play as big a part as people keep saying? Most of the Twitter abuse, you can generally identify who it is behind the account, it’s more the forum than the anonymity?
Re: Online abuse: banning anonymous social media accounts is not the answer
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
Anonymity can enable that but it also enables far nastier things. There are pros and cons. Simply pointing out pros is not enough to win the day.
When the conversation starts with, "Let's ban anonymous accounts!", then enumerating points in favor of anonymous accounts is the right response.
This is troubling logic if we expand it to other areas. For example, what if someone says "Let's ban killing other people"? Is it enough to point out that sometimes killing people saves the lives of other people? Should we outlaw killing in self defense? Should we outlaw killing people who are an imminent threat like active shooters?
If you agree that sometimes killing can be justified, does that mean we need to allow all murder? Obviously not. These issues have nuance. There are always pros and cons. So I will repeat majormajor's point, the mere existence of a pro is not enough of an argument.
Re: Online abuse: banning anonymous social media accounts is not the answer
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 bla…
My reaction is to say that people should have the choice of being either (1)anonymous or (2)nasty when on-line. Not both. (Non-anonymous and nice obviously being allowed.) Too bad that seems impossible to effectively implement at scale.
> Too bad that seems impossible to effectively implement at scale.
There are technical solutions to this. The old one was called hashcash, which a predecessor to cryptocurrency.
To get an account you would have to do something like $5 in electricity worth of computation one time, which you can do without giving anyone your name. But then if you do something foolish and get banned, it'll cost you another $5 (or however much is necessary to provide a sufficient deterrent) to get a new account.
Obviously now you could just have them pay (or mine for you) a small amount of cryptocurrency, which would then go to offset the cost of banning the spammers who still try their luck.
Re: Online abuse: banning anonymous social media accounts is not the answer
#127I think the relevant property is not anonymity, it's accountability. The argument against anonymity is that it will make people more accountable, but that's not always true. Rather, it's the way an online community structures itself.
For instance, here on HN we have the ability to be anonymous (on a sliding scale -- people can say who they are in their profiles, or be completely anonymous, or somewhere in between, posting contact info so that with effort they can be tied to their offline identity). But compared to many online communities, there's very little abuse here, and I'd argue that's because there's accountability -- there are clear standards, and those are enforced both by the moderators and by the community itself. Whether you post as yourself, fully anonymously, or somewhere in between, there's a community standard that hold you accountable for your posts.
I, personally, highly value the ability to have online identities somewhat separate from my offline one. I'm not trying to hide anything, I simply find it freeing to be able to enter a community without dragging around the weight of previous personal history, and to be able to establish an identity specific to that community I'm participating in. I always found this one of the amazing things about the internet, and I've been saddened to see that undermined. At the same time, I absolutely try to be accountable for what I say online, I expect others to hold me to that, and I hold others to that standard. None of this requires I know someone's "real" name, or that they know mine.
Re: Online abuse: banning anonymous social media accounts is not the answer
#128Re: Online abuse: banning anonymous social media accounts is not the answer
#129Long-time anon here.
You will need a team of data scientists to express the formula capable of counting how many websites, social media, forums, and entire internets I've been banned from.
And yet, here I still stand.
You think banning deprived me of influence or participating in the conversation.
And yet, here I still stand.
You think that we can't get you addicted to banning people. That we can't make you fixate on trees and ignore the forest you leave aflame in your wake. All in the name to hunt us.
And yet, here I still stand.
You think we can't steer the conversation by making your new addiction to censorship the center piece of our influence operations.
And yet, here I still stand.
We taken the eternal flame war between overeducated face-saving keyboard activists and trolls from BBSs and over the course of decades, scaled it to consume the entirety of actual meat space. And you, dedicated banners, have always opted in, telling yourself that with greater scale, you can finally defeat us.
And yet, here I still stand.
You will never overcome your addiction to censorship. We control you. We own you. You slash and burn everything you touch and we steer you into our political enemies at will.
And when you have finally made so many enemies that they retaliate against you, here I still stand in the aftermath.
You will never defeat the long-time anons. You are our servants.
Re: Online abuse: banning anonymous social media accounts is not the answer
#130The article cites the recent murder of politician David Amess as the purpose for revisiting discussions about banning anonymity on social networks. But Amess was stabbed to death by a Somali migrant with ‘religious and ideological motivations’. What does that have to do with social media anonymity?
Nothing. There's a very common pattern you see in political responses to outrages and tragedies which is: Something terrible has happened. Something must be done. X is something. Therefore X must be done. It doesn't actually matter what X is, the important thing for the government is to be seen to be doing something. In reality the calls by UK politicians to end online anonymity will fizzle out in a few weeks once th…
More often X is something the existing authoritarians want so the solution to basically anything immediately jumps to the already proposed and planned X. The event is just the excuse and the details irrelevant.