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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

#291

Post by croutonwagon »

Theory5 wrote: post #281
croutonwagon wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will say. Over the last year I have more and more just pulled back. I have regularly wiped my Reddit account, come back for a bit, notes the toxicity and blatant bias and wiped it again. Within my circle of friends I no longer really discuss current events or politics. Once a pastime of challenging our beliefs and opinions has kinda just….stopped. And most are pretty moderate and more just burned out from the toxic…

I mean, that's should be a reasonable understanding for most people. Sure, there are companies out there I don't support because I don't like what they do. But there are others with opinions I disagree with, but I still patronize them. And its important to recognize that the stores I refuse to patronize, and those I do that hold views I dislike, are probably not given the same distinctions by others, even those with…

Completely agree on all counts. But what I have seen change, overall, is that there is now a trend that these differences of opinion are no longer respected and now generate offense and in more severe cases attempts at retribution. I understand this is totally me generalizing and completely from my observations and not necessarily empirical evidence of anything, but i find it concerning nonetheless.

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

#292

Post by croutonwagon »

tickettohide wrote: post #285
croutonwagon wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will say. Over the last year I have more and more just pulled back. I have regularly wiped my Reddit account, come back for a bit, notes the toxicity and blatant bias and wiped it again. Within my circle of friends I no longer really discuss current events or politics. Once a pastime of challenging our beliefs and opinions has kinda just….stopped. And most are pretty moderate and more just burned out from the toxic…

+1 to all this. I raise fewer issues in work, am less willing to engage in debate with everyone, and am transitioning to treating the Internet with ephemerality (throwaway...), mostly read-only. Perhaps this is a win for those that seek to control speech.

>Perhaps this is a win for those that seek to control speech.

I suspect this may be part of it. And it may also be maturity or changes on my end too. Im much less apt to scream into the void. Im more aware my opinions dont really mean anything to others and so I filter much more. In some cases out of politeness, in others to avoid negative reactions or less than desirable outcomes.

I will say that my observations of people being notably more galvanized in their opinions, less open minded and more aggressive in attacking those they disagree with, even if its a passive aggressive attack and not one based in seeking retribution, have probably accelerated these more "isolationist tendencies" that I have seen develop within myself.

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

#293

Post by Arch-TK »

burnafter182 wrote: post #227
michaelmrose wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People spread harmful lies better when they aren't banned from doing so and when the harm they do is attached to a pseudonym not their actual life. 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. It's trivial to argue that people agree to engage with online communities as they agree to engage in in person com…

> People spread harmful lies better when they aren't banned from doing so and when the harm they do is attached to a pseudonym not their actual life. 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 p…

It's incredibly unsettling that discussions like these seem to be fought tooth and nail on the internet of all places in this day and age.

It seems like we would never have gotten this far if it wasn't for the kind of interactions you are defending and yet you are entangled in a debate with someone who likely grew up in a society where this approach to interaction was championed throughout their life who is simultaneously insisting that it's more harm than good.

More unsettling is the fact that when I read the sentence:

>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?

I began to wonder whether if I said that in public I would end up in a lot of trouble and possibly fired for daring to suggest that being rejected could hurt the feelings of the person being rejected in an equally valid way as it may make the person being asked out feel uneasy.

I eagerly await the day when I do not constantly feel terrorized by the threat of becoming socially outcast for saying something which should be entirely benign but which has become taboo.

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

#295

Post by evgen »

Telemakhos wrote: post #280
evgen wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anonymity makes abuse easier. It diminishes the cost to the abuser and places almost all of the cost on the victim. I would also recommend that you not be so quick to push the blame back on 'the community', because when you do so you tend to end up with the gatekeepers for those communities being forced to shoulder the cost and then we end up with twitter bans, Facebook moderation, and a lot of pearl clutching by the…

I don't blame the community but the subject. People on car repair fora are perfectly civil to each other; people discussing politics become barbarians toward each other. Take two people from the car repair forum and have them hash out politics, and watch them turn into savages. It's the subject matter.

The stake are higher in political discussion, but you do not have to search long to find uncivil behavior in just about any online interaction. People in a car repair forum might be kind to each other, but put those same two into a sports discussion, or even a discussion of Ford v Chevy and things can get quite salty quite quickly.

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

#296

Post by dane-pgp »

dane-pgp wrote: post #146
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,…

As an interesting alternative, imagine that the site asked you to print out a random number on a piece of paper and (within a 2 hour window, for example) film yourself holding it in front of a building or landmark that you claim is within 100 miles of your home. You could cover your face during the filming, or temporarily affix the paper to some surface, like a tree, and then upload your video clip to a selection of…

I don't know why this is such an unpopular idea. For comparison, people have implemented a "Proof of Humanity" system[0] which requires users to record a video of themselves holding up a key-derived number. This is very similar to my idea, except it relies on the uniqueness of faces rather than the cost of visiting a location.

Both ideas seem imperfect, but obviously a system that links your ID to your face is less private than one which links your ID to a circle of radius 100 miles.

It is also interesting to see that the system I linked to uses a "court" system among its members, where people are randomly picked to adjudicate claims about invalid IDs. There is even a system for claiming that a user has died and having their key revoked if they cannot prove they are alive.

[0] https://www.proofofhumanity.id/

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

#297

Post by lionkor »

EGreg wrote: post #154
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…

The more I questioned why we need profile pics or real names, or even usernames online, the more I realized ... we don't. They are just vectors for deanonymizing people across sites. Will I remember "lionkor" among thousands of other HN posters and think about your previous posts? No. But I can click and see your other posts, if the site lets me have that feature. And more importantly, your REPUTATION tells me how ma…

> how many people have upvoted your content that you produce

This is what I wish I said! It's about what you say, not who you are, everything else will just be used for bias and "cancelling".

I hang out on IRCs a fair bit, and those are almost perfect for this. Maybe if instead of usernames it would just be numbers, that'd be perfect.

Simple and effective exchange of ideas, without any bias as to "who is this", "what do they look like", etc.

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