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

Perfectly nice people turn into psychos when they interact with people online. Observe kids playing games in real life, they are very rarely as vulgar or sadistic as on online games.

A walk even in the most crowded places is much nicer experience that an anonymous online place.

Oh and yes, the very few cases where anonymity is useful are exactly that kind of cases(whistleblowing, journalism targeting powerful figures etc.). These are rarities and are valuable but %99 of the discussion on the internet are not about these and I suggested a mechanism for anonymity anyway.

Second all of these arguments seem to suggest just letting the government know you identity as some sort of compromise, but what about when it is the government I am trying to avoid, sure someone can dox me, or can tell my employer to fire me, but only the government can arrest me and execute me if they determine I've done something to upset someone powerful enough within the government. Sure the government can eventually track me down with their resources, but anything that makes it harder is better.

Do they? To me it seems that people demand credentials in most cases to merit trust from an unknown. I certainly don't hop on 4chan and assume literal factual information is being doled out in every post. Nor on Twitter, nor Fecebook. I might backtest whatever they're proposing, but remain skeptical until I've seen it with my own eyes. And in any case if we look into the annals of history, this is blatantly false, there are reams of examples of people lying in plain sight. Tyrants and demagogues, kings and courts, basically every politician, corporations, and just regular people. Of course we've always had the issue of "determination of truth", history to the victor and such.

>It is vastly harder to exclude people spreading harmful lies when they can do it under 27 trivially created and then discarded identities across 12 platform.

Let's assume we've actually objectively determined the truth: what happens when the liars are let free? They're running around screaming 1+1=3, how is it that they're going to intuited by everyone else? I suspect, as idiots. Naive interventionism in this case turns them into a divided minority instead of an integrated (and stupid) extremity. Upon being separated they go off and get more and more wild, 1+1=5, 10, 0... Their bonds grow in strength because they're made a separate minority, and far less likely to cease their stupidity.

>It's trivial to argue that people agree to engage with online communities as they agree to engage in in person communities but what is the realistic alternative? Both huddle in your basement AND don't engage online either?

For one, I'm not saying that everything everywhere had ought to have the facilities of anonymity, but that instituting a mode of state coercion blanketing every site on the internet is plainly a hazard. But this line is non-sequitur anyways, we're talking about anonymity in social media not in-person interaction.

>It is unrealistic when your online life is a large part of people's gateway to communication and culture. People deserve to be able to engage in such without also expecting harm.

How do you define harm? Here's a salient conundrum: a guy asks a girl out, she tells him she's not interested. Or the obverse, however you like it. In either case they're very likely emotionally wounded. Then what? What do we take from this?

>Furthermore people's online hate touches people's lives with or without their opting for engagement when the festering hate nurtured online gives birth to real world violence, mass murder, coup, collapse of civil society.

The Nazis did this, the Khmer Rogue did this, the Bolsheviks did this all in plain sight. Millions dead in their wake. Violence was often a means to a better end - depending on perspective. The Hellenic empire was established through warfare, Alexander has been intuited as a great unifier, bringing together a vast and highly integrated culture made of many diverse cultures. The French revolution was a supermassive turning point, and largely lead us to be where we are today, but it was extremely violent. The USA was founded after a revolutionary war. The concern is wanton violence, which in any case is rare, and I suspect anonymity on the internet has little to contribute to it overall, despite the narratives espoused by many.

Civil society is free discourse, but we've long been eroding it.

>It seems trivially true that anonymity enables hate and I support both people's right to voice unpopular but not harmful ideas and consequences for those who call for hate and violence.

If we adopt the relativistic standpoint, every opinion is harmful to someone. Utilitarianism is flawed, not everyone can be happy, even negative utilitarianism is flawed.

For a moment, leave aside the deft and light-touch moderation that HN moderators such as dang performs, and how hard that may or may not be to enable at "scale"; just consider: do you really want anonymity to be gone forever, or do you engage in some very deep discussions with other anonymous people on a daily basis, right here on HN?

Because that seems to prove the point; maybe it's the exception that proves the point, and perhaps older people who remember what Eternal September was might remember that sometimes anonymity without any moderation at all means a breakout of trolldom, but it's simply balancing the power of anonymity and rights to privacy against the inevitable things (like spam) that go along with anytime you grant someone freedom.

And that's really what this is about. In the United States, freedom is granted by the Constitution, even though those very freedoms is often abused (or taken for granted.) Innocent until proven guilty? How many times do the guilty get away scot-free because of that precept? And, yet, this "grand experiment", again and again, proves its value, even in the face of repeated attempts to reign in (usually other people's!) freedoms.

The Interwebs can be the same, or they can be different, but yanking anonymity will certainly tilt the playing field in a particular direction... so what direction should it really be tilted in?