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The Real Name Fallacy

blog.coralproject.net

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Re: The Real Name Fallacy

#101

Post by vog »

dirkt wrote: post #90
Swizec wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same rules apply as always: don't share your real name and address online outside very very small and personable communities. People often ask me why i still haven't changed my name to Swizec legally. This is why. You never know who out of the thousands of people you interact with online could get crazy ideas. With a pseudonym they can still identify you and know who you are, but they can't call your bank and do some…

I've shared by real name on Usenet for decades, nobody got crazy ideas (though I've encountered quite a few crazy people). "Calling my bank and doing something silly" doesn't work in the country in live in. There's not a lot people can do with just my name.

I also never had such problems, but others did have these problems, and that's what counts. (Everything else would be victim blaming.)

Re: The Real Name Fallacy

#102

Post by tremon »

syshum wrote: post #86
CM30 wrote: post #62

I think this is probably the key takeaway from the article here: > Designers need to acknowledge that design cannot solve harassment and other social problems on its own. Trying to remove anonymity will not 'fix' trolling and harassment. After all, a lot of people simply don't care what others think of them, know they're too far away to be affected (in most cases) or just have nothing to lose to begin with. What can…

>Trying to remove anonymity will not 'fix' trolling and harassment. After all, a lot of people simply don't care what others think of them, know they're too far away to be affected (in most cases) or just have nothing to lose to begin with. While that is true, many times what person A considers to be harassment, the person that is harassing them does not consider it to be harassment at all. This is not to say the per…

many times what person A considers to be harassment, the person that is harassing them does not consider it to be harassment at all.

To expand on that: "I disagree" is not and should not be a valid defense when someone is accusing you of harassment. Harassment is a violation of personal space and only one person gets to define the limits of that personal space; it is not the aggressor that sets the limits.

In a way, it is the same discussion as with privacy: the only authority on what personal information to share with whom is the person themselves.

Yes, this premise is easily abused, and yes, in US' adversarial society a discussion on this topic carries a lot more weight (because legal) than it probably should, but the fundamental premise is still the same: personal stuff is personal.

As for the false dichotomy between free speech and censorship: that is the same as arguing that freedom can only exist in anarchy; they both rely on a very narrow definition of freedom: that each person exists foremost as a singular entity, and that every interpersonal exchange is governed by mutual negotiation. I think that's a very myopic view, because it implies that every relationship starts adversarial.

Re: The Real Name Fallacy

#103

Post by vog »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #96
dirkt wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've shared by real name on Usenet for decades, nobody got crazy ideas (though I've encountered quite a few crazy people). "Calling my bank and doing something silly" doesn't work in the country in live in. There's not a lot people can do with just my name.

I wonder about treating home address as such a secret. If someone wants to kill/kidnap me, they could always find me at my workplace or on a conference or sth. So what else are people going to do with my home address? Send me a postcard? In the good ol' days, we had this thing called "a phonebook", which was basically a big printed book of alphabetically sorted mappings of surname to phone number and home address...

And as the internet and the possibilities grew, many people started to feel uneasy about it and requested their deletion (or did not register again after changing address and/or ISP). Nowadays, nobody uses the phonebook anymore, the demand vanished and so the supply.

Re: The Real Name Fallacy

#104

Post by eternalban »

vog wrote: post #87
stupidcar wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. People using real names on Usenet did not usually face a serious risk of being harassed and endangered in real life by an army of trolls: E.g. having their address, phone number and other private details stolen and publicly disseminated. Having armed police raid their house because someone has made a bogus 911 call. Having their utilities and back accounts cancelled because someone rang up using their details. H…

> Yes. I see the issues you are stating, but not so much a qualitative change. > serious risk of being harassed and endangered in real life by an army of trolls This type of trolls (aka "stalkers") have already existed decades ago. Back then I had no trouble finding such cases documented in the Usenet archives. Of course, these happened to fewer people, but then, the net was a lot smaller, too. > For many, preserving…

> Back then I had no trouble finding such cases documented in the Usenet archives.

Curious to see a specimen or two if you can dig it up. Not challenging the statement, just mostly interested in which specific era of usenet you are referencing. I couldn't dig up anything earlier than 1999 for "usenet stalking".

Re: The Real Name Fallacy

#105

Post by syshum »

tremon wrote: post #102
syshum wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Trying to remove anonymity will not 'fix' trolling and harassment. After all, a lot of people simply don't care what others think of them, know they're too far away to be affected (in most cases) or just have nothing to lose to begin with. While that is true, many times what person A considers to be harassment, the person that is harassing them does not consider it to be harassment at all. This is not to say the per…

many times what person A considers to be harassment, the person that is harassing them does not consider it to be harassment at all. To expand on that: "I disagree" is not and should not be a valid defense when someone is accusing you of harassment. Harassment is a violation of personal space and only one person gets to define the limits of that personal space; it is not the aggressor that sets the limits. In a way,…

>To expand on that: "I disagree" is not and should not be a valid defense when someone is accusing you of harassment. Harassment is a violation of personal space and only one person gets to define the limits of that personal space; it is not the aggressor that sets the limits.

I disagree completely on this. Using this definition of harassment, in combination with a prohibition on said harassment is ripe for abuse. I have seen many many many people claim others are "harassing" them simply because the other person expressed a dissenting opinion from their own. Harassment must have an objective definition, not a subjective one. At-least if it is going to enforced as a part of over all rules for a platform like Twitter.

Further under this definition of Harassment no one can be harassed online, since you can not violate a persons PERSONAL space if you have no physical proximity to the person

>>they both rely on a very narrow definition of freedom: that each person exists foremost as a singular entity, and that every interpersonal exchange is governed by mutual negotiation. I think that's a very myopic view, because it implies that every relationship starts adversarial.

What is your definition of freedom then. I do believe every person is a singular entity, with self agency, and that every interaction with other people is a mutual negotiation where by both parties should voluntary agree to interact and at any time for any reason either party can choose to end the interaction. With out the ability to chose whom you interact with, and for what reason you can not have freedom. That is far from myopic

Re: The Real Name Fallacy

#106

Post by NoGravitas »

vog wrote: post #89
Pica_soO wrote: post #82

The Real Name Fallacy is social nostalgia- if we all could go back to the village, then everything would be good? The solution for this and fake news, would be chains of trust. I do not trust my government, i do not trust my media, but i know two or three guys, i would trust too know. If these guys vouched for the guys vouching for the knowledge i see to be true, i would trust that. In return, i can fade the crack-po…

> But this system would need to be decentralized Back in the times of Usenet, this already existed: The client-side (hence decentral) "Scorefile" and "Killfile".

I so often wish that web fora, social media, etc., all worked on a common protocol like a modernized Usenet so that we could use our choice of clients and have useful features like scorefiles.

So much ink has been spilled about how Facebook's algorithm chooses what to show you, but imagine having complete control on the client side over both the algorithm, and the parameters tuning it. We used to have this, the only thing stopping it now is bad incentives.

Re: The Real Name Fallacy

#107

Post by NoGravitas »

bleair wrote: post #77

I'm biased by empirical data - e.g. look at youtube comments (anonymous) vs. amazon reviews (real identity owned by amazon). Human nature demonstrates that a fraction of people really like to put down / bully / see others suffering because they are personally unhappy (e.g. the shock talk shows). Anonymity allows bullying behavior with no consequence. More simply, why do people spend time and energy online "trolling"…

I admin a fairly large page on Facebook. I would say the level of meanness in the comments is closer to YouTube comments than to Amazon reviews, despite Facebook's real names policy.

Re: The Real Name Fallacy

#108

Post by Frqy3 »

wfunction wrote: post #4

Thing is, if I had to guess, I would say Facebook doesn't attempt to make you use your real name to make the community better in the first place. That's almost certainly just its pretext for everyone who's willing to fall for it. Most likely, it does that to make sure it can identify you globally and uniquely for commercial/advertising purposes. Think about how much more valuable your online identity is if you go sol…

Your online identity is also more valuable if Facebook can link your profile in with data brokers such as Acxiom.

Re: The Real Name Fallacy

#109

Post by eternalban »

bad_user wrote: post #45
vog wrote: post #39

The real name discussion is as old as the Usenet, maybe even older. I find it strange to see it re-appearing again and again every few years for almost decades. Back then, the consensus was roughly: 1. If a community accepts pseudonyms, it is polite to use either your realname or an obvious pseudonym. 2. If a community places high value on realnames, either use your realname or a realname-sounding (i.e. non-obvious)…

The problem was that back then you didn't have service providers with lock-in on a market, like today's Facebook and the Internet was only a thing for techies, whereas nowadays more than half of the world's population has access to the Internet. Can you just not use Facebook? There are obviously only 3 choices: (1) not use it, but then you won't have an account where all of your friends are; (2) use it with your real…

> Lets not pretend that today's Internet is the same as the Internet from the eighties and nineties. Your father and grandma weren't on Usenet.

This is an important point. This entire infrastructure was designed, and initially used, by academics and engineers. I remember thinking about the SPAM problem in '95 and reaching the conclusion that given its provenance, little if any thought was given to addressing anti-social behavior by users by its designers.

Re: The Real Name Fallacy

#110

Post by eternalban »

freshyill wrote: post #94
mirimir wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a fourth option: use Facebook with your real name, and separately with fake name(s). For the real-name account, carefully manage "friends" to avoid problems with family, friends, coworkers, etc. Make sure that there's no leakage between your real-name account and fake-name accounts, or among fake-name accounts. Practice good compartmentalization OpSec.

Google requires phone or text verification on new accounts. I'm not sure about Facebook, but they do require an email address, and that has to come from somewhere. Eventually, you will require verification via phone or text, and that's when it gets harder to prevent these services from linking back to you. I'm not sure what it takes to create a burner phone number not linked to you these days. None of that really mat…

> A few months ago, worrying about such things seemed kind of silly to me. Now, I think I understand the need better

I am assuming you are now concerned because of the incoming administration. I find this puzzling.

Do you remember this character? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ashcroft

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