Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

theconversation.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

261–270 of 297 posts

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

#261

Post by mrtksn »

nobody9999 wrote: post #255
mrtksn wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't worked out the cryptographic mechanisms but my ballpark assessment is that it should be possible to work out a mechanism that protects your identity up until you accept to exchange exposure for ability. The business model is probably more of an issue, as you pointed out. Oh BTW, it doesn't have to be a legal identity, I think. It could be some kind of identity that you build, it costs something and can be i…

>I haven't worked out the cryptographic mechanisms but my ballpark assessment is that it should be possible to work out a mechanism that protects your identity up until you accept to exchange exposure for ability. The business model is probably more of an issue, as you pointed out. Another piece to this that you haven't addressed is that in the environment you propose, once you've chosen to expose your identity, ever…

It all comes from my observation that the social platforms enabled interactions at huge scale without implementing the natural safeguards of real life interactions. We meet with unpleasant people too, we had unpopular opinions prior the internet but we managed to work things out. It wasn't the end of the world to have an argument or say something horrible and all came down to accumulate it on a single identity. To end up alone, you would have had to say something extremely bad, something inexcusable but other than that you had the incentive to work on your ideas and relationships if you had controversial opinions. You can say something bad and be dismissed and you can also keep pushing for it until you get accepted.

On the social interactions on the internet, you miss much of it. If someone says something controversial, they will be often censored through voting mechanisms, shadow bans and account removals.

I'm extremely annoyed from our lack of ability to express controversial opinions online. Contrary to the narrative, anonymous accounts don't actually say anything controversial if they are going to get any traction. They usually say something populist and rally people.

It also enables people who think alike to gather and re-enforce their opinions. There are no controversial opinions in online conversations, there are controversial clans that talk to each other and sometimes engage in flamewars when they encounter each other. Trump never said anything unpopular, name a person who you think is horrible but popular and that person never says unpopular things, that's how they are popular. The web has become popularity contests and the anonymity only serves for saying the popular opinions of one group when you are in another.

On every platform that I know, the most popular opinions are those who are promoted and the unpopular ones are hidden or buried, even here on HN is the same thing. You can observe how my truly unpopular opinion will get greyed out and sent to the botton of the thread, possibly collapsed and out of reach to the most so that the populist opinions on this platform can reign.

I want a mechanism where expressing controversial opinions doesn't punish your reach but because I know that this can lead to some horrible stuff(like the things in 4chan etc), I propose a way to put your reputation on the line to do it.

4Chan is an exception where controversial ideas are not buried but they have an issue with some people who are truly horrible.

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

#262

Post by Dma54rhs »

colpabar wrote: post #33
polartx wrote: post #14

The 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?

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/oct/18/pm-urged-to-... >While police are investigating whether there are any links to Islamist extremism and have not connected the killing to the targeting of MPs online, allies of Amess said he had voiced growing concern about threats and toxicity within public discourse as they demanded a crackdown. >Francois, the MP for Rayleigh and Wickford, which neighbours Amess’s South…

This is long lost fight, anonymity in the UK because under the banner of racism the vast majority of them want to get rid of it and footballers who rally it are very influential. It's just a matter of time.

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

#263

Post by gtvwill »

Well that's a load of bs if I've ever read one. I'm all for privacy but the big two social media companies Facebook and Twitter sure as shit should be forced to have options to allow folks to force only verified individuals are able to interact with them. Their promotion of criminal behaviour by allowing with such ease the impersonation of others and the unabated harassment of individuals is a load of shit.

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

#264

Post by [deleted] »

mrtksn wrote: post #201
_0ffh wrote: post #173

>Banning anonymous social media accounts is not the answer to online abuse Entirely true, but it is also not the reason for the push to de-anonymise (and de-pseudonymise) the internet. It is merely the pretext. The true reason is to make it impossible to speak your mind without fear of retribution. The democratisation of the public discourse haunts and frightens the ruling classes to their bones. The broad disseminat…

But retribution is an important social construct. Sometimes, you speak your mind and get retribution. Sometimes you deserve it however if you are not getting a fair one people side with you. I know that this is very unpopular opinion but there are very few cases where anonymity is useful. The rest is mostly useful for the abusive ones. Instead of banning people and removing content, I would prefer losing anonymity. I…

[deleted]

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

#266

Post by boomboomsubban »

AndrewUnmuted wrote: post #187
shuntress wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being rebuked for saying something ignorant and harmful will just be part of their "intellectual journey".

Look, you are clearly chastising an account whose first language is not English, and for not having penned their remarks in a way that would satisfy the crypto-fascist tendencies of the average tech worker living in SF. You can call what he said ignorant on some level if you read into it enough - why would you, is my question? - but the idea that it is harmful is ridiculous. Your remarks and others calling this guy r…

>you are clearly chastising an account whose first language is not English

Why do you think this? Their spelling and grammar show few obvious mistakes to me, and after reading your comment I looked at their history and they seem to be an American for at least twenty years.

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

#267

Post by bduerst »

BitwiseFool wrote: post #74
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,…

Isn't this basically what Parler tried to do? They got hacked and the PII of their users was leaked onto the internet and they were derided for collecting so much information.

You can do third party verification without storing the physical credentials. Parler was many things, and poorly designed was one of them.

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

#268

Post by ivan_gammel »

hpoe wrote: post #223
ivan_gammel wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you are talking about is not anonymity, it is identity protection. There are many pre-digital examples of what it could be: witness protection programs, confidentiality of journalist sources etc. They are all established, well regulated and with lots of precedents of analysis of those practices in courts. Full anonymity can and should be banned, but we need to develop some sort of new professional privilege to p…

So two points: First you advocate special people should get special protections for being in a special job, I am sure that will work out real well. 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…

I did not say „special people“. The confidentiality privilege applies to the keepers of the information about identity, not to the people who own the identity - that could be anyone. If some government wants to control what you say online, they will make sure you do not have any anonymity at all, like China does with Uigurs by forcing them to use devices with pre-installed tracking software. Many countries do not have technical capabilities to do so, but this also means that main beneficiaries of anonymity there are radical political and criminal groups rather than ordinary people, which may not even have good access to the Internet.

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

#270

Post by AnthonyMouse »

ademup wrote: post #136
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 howeve…

This just seems like punishing the poor, very much like fines for speeding. "Rich" people get the freedom to do and say what they wish, but the poor must sit still and only convey favorable opinions.

> This just seems like punishing the poor, very much like fines for speeding. "Rich" people get the freedom to do and say what they wish, but the poor must sit still and only convey favorable opinions.

It's $5, not $500. Anybody using an account long-term will experience more cost from having it deleted than from paying that amount for a new one.

The reason it works is that a poor person gets to amortize that $5 over the life of the account, typically ten years or more, which makes it a negligible amount even for someone making minimum wage. Whereas the spammer gets banned and needs a new account every 90 seconds.

And if the problem is that your mods are imposing censorship on disadvantaged people, you don't want something that makes that sort of "moderation" effective. But that's a different problem. Maybe try not having such a small number of large platforms so it's easier for people to abandon the ones doing such things.

Post reply on HN