8 ms·

I think what happens when we have truly anonymous free speech, on places such as Reddit, Twitter, and 4Chan, shows that we are nowhere as civilized as we like t

by Esau 10y ago

I think what happens when we have truly anonymous free speech, on places such as Reddit, Twitter, and 4Chan, shows that we are nowhere as civilized as we like to think we are.

gohrt 10y ago
Are we more civilized when there is no anonymous free speech, and people are abusive only in semi-private situations?
- twblalock 10y ago
  I think so. Actions toward others have a much larger societal impact than privately held beliefs. For example, if someone has racist beliefs which do not affect his actions in any way, his effect on other people in society would be exactly the same as it would be if he did not have racist beliefs. In other words, beliefs that are not acted on or expressed have no effect on society. There may be some social benefit to knowing who the racists are. But if they are anonymous, that benefit is probably lost. Their speech is protected by the first amendment either way, but Reddit is not required to enforce the constitution, so they can shut down the accounts if they want to.
  - brokenmachine 10y ago
    I can't imagine a situation where someone has beliefs that do not affect his actions in any way. I would agree that unexpressed values would propagate less.
    - twblalock 10y ago
      > I can't imagine a situation where someone has beliefs that do not affect his actions in any way. That was an extreme example used to illustrate the point I was making. Racism is also only an example; there are plenty of other beliefs that are bad for society. Personally, I suspect that sexism is probably far more prevalent on Reddit than racism, for example. Social stigma can prevent one's beliefs from affecting one's actions, or at least reduce the effect of those beliefs on one's actions. If it is shameful to be perceived as a racist, racists will attempt to hide their racism by not acting in racist ways toward others, at least when other people are looking. This does not obviate the effects of unconscious biases or eliminate racism, but the net result for society is fewer overtly racist actions, and that's a good thing. If racism becomes acceptable again, racists will feel freer to act on their beliefs, which will make life worse for the targets of their racism. So, there is a case to be made that if people repress their beliefs only partially, society is better off -- not as much better off as if certain people repressed their beliefs fully, but still better off. The danger of allowing racism to flourish in online communities, especially ones as large as Reddit and Twitter, is that it re-normalizes racism and makes it seem acceptable to be a racist. It can be more than merely acceptable -- it can even be a contrarian badge of pride, justified as a rebellion against political correctness. (That kind of justification for it is reinforced when anti-harassment policies are not uniformly and consistently enforced, because it can make moderation appear to be arbitrary or politically motivated.) When that kind of thing happens, it makes society worse.
      - brokenmachine 10y ago
        Well said. I do not agree with giving up on freedom of speech because some people will say hurtful things. Every time I have read racism or seen racists on TV it has merely exposed how ill-informed, counter-productive and just plain wrong those ideas are, and has prompted myself and others to dispute those wrong ideas. There is also the slim chance that if the dummies are called out on their wrong ideas, they may end up changing them. Anonymous freedom of speech is a slightly different case, but I still feel that all freedom of speech is valuable and needs to be preserved.
      - tamana 10y ago
        Now explain why Facebook has far worse racist garbage than Reddit (at least the parts that mainstream users see without digging for crap) proudly on display to family and friends and the public, Real Name and photos attached.
        twblalock 10y ago
        Lots of people are racist. That is a sufficient explanation. However, I very strongly suspect that no matter what the level of racism on Facebook is, it would be far higher if people were able to post anonymously.
        reitanqild 10y ago
        > However, I very strongly suspect that no matter what the level of racism on Facebook is, it would be far higher if people were able to post anonymously. Counterexample HN and arstechnica.com As I have previously hypothesised a lot of good users (me included) seems to be scared away by real names policies. Pseudonyms allowed and linked to phone numbers or national ids combined with karma seems like a workable middle ground for me.
      - rmc 10y ago
        > If racism becomes acceptable again Some would say that racism is still acceptable in USA today. Just look at Trump. (Yes not as openly as before, but it hasn't been erradicated) There's a saying that the USA went from thinking that racism was OK, to not knowing what racism is.
    - bloaf 10y ago
      Imagine that he never came into contact or communication with a person that he was racist against. E.g. a racist hermit.
      - brokenmachine 10y ago
        In that case, then who cares what his ideas are? If a racist hermit is racist in the woods, does he make an offensive sound?
      - afarrell 10y ago
        If a racist hermit never interacts directly with anyone, sure that is harmless. But if she actually just racially isolates herself (which is pretty hard to do in many parts of America), then she still has influence over the institutions around her. If someone then wants to join her racist gardening club, then her racism ends up affecting things.
    - adrianN 10y ago
      There are probably many people who are sexually attracted to children but don't act on these feelings in any way.
- reitanqild 10y ago
  I find HN and arstechnica.com a lot more civilized than the comments section on the major local newspaper. I have hypothesised that the reason is that without anonymity only * (trolls with) fake accounts * politically correct people and people who think they are pc * and people who don't care about real life reputation anyway post in any kind of controversial debate. Normal knowledgeable people doesn't want to lose the dream job because of something they commented on 5 years ago.
  - nkurz 10y ago
    You missed: * naive idealists who believe that truth and reason matter more than immediate public perception This is subtly different than "people who don't care about real life reputation" in that they sincerely hope that despite any short term damage to reputation, in the long run others (or at least some subset) will come respect their honesty and rationality. I'm probably naive and idealist, but at least on HN, I think this is a significant group. Although, am I reading correctly that you are considering HN to be "without anonymity"? In the current "persistent pseudonymous" system, what do you think constitutes a "fake account"?
    - reitanqild 10y ago
      > Although, am I reading correctly that you are considering HN to be "without anonymity"? No. Sorry if unclear. I categorise HN accounts as pseudonymous with optional real life names. > In the current "persistent pseudonymous" system, what do you think constitutes a "fake account"? What would annoy me is real sockpuppet accounts, controlling more than one account and using it to * upvote ones own comments and postings * astroturf * using it as a strawman to defame opponents (i.e. by running a sock puppet account that seemingly supports some cases while posting bad arguments for that case etc.) * etc Personally I have nothing against using multiple accounts as long as there is a reason (i.e. someone has an account with full name and another that they use when they want to post or comment something that they do not want to reflect back on their real life persona, family and workplace.)
  - DanBC 10y ago
    Many local newspaper comment sections have people posting vile things under their real names, often linked to their facebook accounts.
- godshatter 10y ago
  I don't think it's necessarily anonymous free speech that is the problem. I hang out occasionally on Freenet, on FMS and Sone specifically. Freenet is very anonymous by design. It turns out it is a mostly pleasant and helpful community. I think one good reason for that is that both FMS (which is a bulletin board system) and Sone (which is more like Facebook posts) use a version of a "web of trust". People you don't want to hear get filtered out, and others can trust your trust list and filter them out as well. Some people only filter out obvious abuse, others filter out more. Frost (another bulletin board system without a web of trust), on the other hand, is a downright awful place to go most of the time. I wonder how feasible it would be for Reddit to implement subreddit-based web of trusts for users, as opposed to moderation. People could filter others (or not) individually and not have to rely on someone else to try to filter for the whole group.
twblalock 10y ago
YouTube comments are what really does it for me.
- lintiness 10y ago
  tip of me fidora, m'lady
- henrygrew 10y ago
  That is where the real asshats are, i wonder how youtube is dealing with this.
  - dcole2929 10y ago
    In short? They're not
InclinedPlane 10y ago
I think this is a mistaken impression. The problem, I think, is that we haven't figured out new norms and boundaries for online socialization, as we have for other forms of communication and other media. One of the things that makes online communication so potent is that it is not just easy but also near instantaneous with a global reach. But we have been slacking on building the tools to manage the problems inherent in that power. One of which is the concentration and distillation of harassment. A tiny group of people can generate a tremendous amount of harassment which, through the magic of modern communication technologies, automatically gets funneled to the receiver. Even, say, a million people worldwide is still a tiny fraction of all people in the world, let alone all people online (less than 0.1%), but if there were a million dedicated harassers online it would be a hellscape. In reality it only takes a few assholes to spoil the "mood" and the "fun" of interacting online in public, from a few dozen up to tens to hundreds of thousands. A minute but vocal, abusive, and provocative sub-group can easily change the entire tone of a conversation or change someone's experience using social media from good to bad. How many people sending you death threats and rape threats regularly would it take to sour your experience with social media? The real answer is: a very tiny number. Right now that very tiny number of agents provocateurs are having an outsized impact on online communities and communication platforms, because they are leveraging the power of vitriol, hate, and targeted harassment. And also precisely because the platform builders (whether it's facebook, twitter, or reddit) have been far behind in building tooling to help deal with these problems, and because the social norms haven't caught up with the behavior. Going back to the '90s and even the '80s it was common for, say, usenet newsreaders to have tools built in for ignoring posts from people you wanted to ignore, and the modern tools for such things are barely at that level, if they exist at all, despite the problem being even more difficult to tackle. Additionally, there were a lot more moderated communities back then, whereas today the norm is unmoderated communities. Just like the security problems of the early internet days we've largely been surviving based on luck and absence of dedicated attacks, and partly just due to ignorance of the worst that was actually happening. There are a lot of people who still don't think that harassment on the internet is a serious problem because they don't actually understand it all, having never experienced it in its most potent forms. The worst takeaway from this would be deciding that most people are garbage and socializing with other human beings is best avoided (online or off). That's a classic "stranger danger" overreaction. We need better tools on various platforms. We need more people speaking out about the badness of harassment online and for people to stop parroting the stupid line "oh, it's just online, you can ignore it, it's not real" or defending targeted personal harassment as any sort of defensible "free speech".
BurningFrog 10y ago
I have two (opposing) thoughts on that 1. We don't always want to express all our opinions and thoughts among people we know, because they carries significant social cost. So we end up saying a disproportionate amount of those things anonymously online. 2. It used to be that nobody had to listen to the outcasts and the lonely. People we don't enjoy being around. But now they can participate in online forums as much as anyone. In part, it's a good thing that these voices can be heard, and that they can find likeminded to talk to. But a lot of them are outcasts because they're jerks, and online we do have to listen to them.
- CaptSpify 10y ago
  I'll argue on having to listen to them. I'm all for free-speech, no matter how vile it is. I'm also all for self-controlled censorship, and tools to facilitate that. If you don't want to hear, say, racist bullshit, ignore it, and move on. If it becomes too noisy, create a filter, and move on. If it is still too noisy, it's probably a good sign that your not fitting in well with the community.

by Esau 10y ago

I think what happens when we have truly anonymous free speech, on places such as Reddit, Twitter, and 4Chan, shows that we are nowhere as civilized as we like to think we are.

gohrt 10y ago

Are we more civilized when there is no anonymous free speech, and people are abusive only in semi-private situations?

twblalock 10y ago
I think so. Actions toward others have a much larger societal impact than privately held beliefs. For example, if someone has racist beliefs which do not affect his actions in any way, his effect on other people in society would be exactly the same as it would be if he did not have racist beliefs. In other words, beliefs that are not acted on or expressed have no effect on society. There may be some social benefit to knowing who the racists are. But if they are anonymous, that benefit is probably lost. Their speech is protected by the first amendment either way, but Reddit is not required to enforce the constitution, so they can shut down the accounts if they want to.
- brokenmachine 10y ago
  I can't imagine a situation where someone has beliefs that do not affect his actions in any way. I would agree that unexpressed values would propagate less.
  - twblalock 10y ago
    > I can't imagine a situation where someone has beliefs that do not affect his actions in any way. That was an extreme example used to illustrate the point I was making. Racism is also only an example; there are plenty of other beliefs that are bad for society. Personally, I suspect that sexism is probably far more prevalent on Reddit than racism, for example. Social stigma can prevent one's beliefs from affecting one's actions, or at least reduce the effect of those beliefs on one's actions. If it is shameful to be perceived as a racist, racists will attempt to hide their racism by not acting in racist ways toward others, at least when other people are looking. This does not obviate the effects of unconscious biases or eliminate racism, but the net result for society is fewer overtly racist actions, and that's a good thing. If racism becomes acceptable again, racists will feel freer to act on their beliefs, which will make life worse for the targets of their racism. So, there is a case to be made that if people repress their beliefs only partially, society is better off -- not as much better off as if certain people repressed their beliefs fully, but still better off. The danger of allowing racism to flourish in online communities, especially ones as large as Reddit and Twitter, is that it re-normalizes racism and makes it seem acceptable to be a racist. It can be more than merely acceptable -- it can even be a contrarian badge of pride, justified as a rebellion against political correctness. (That kind of justification for it is reinforced when anti-harassment policies are not uniformly and consistently enforced, because it can make moderation appear to be arbitrary or politically motivated.) When that kind of thing happens, it makes society worse.
    - brokenmachine 10y ago
      Well said. I do not agree with giving up on freedom of speech because some people will say hurtful things. Every time I have read racism or seen racists on TV it has merely exposed how ill-informed, counter-productive and just plain wrong those ideas are, and has prompted myself and others to dispute those wrong ideas. There is also the slim chance that if the dummies are called out on their wrong ideas, they may end up changing them. Anonymous freedom of speech is a slightly different case, but I still feel that all freedom of speech is valuable and needs to be preserved.
    - tamana 10y ago
      Now explain why Facebook has far worse racist garbage than Reddit (at least the parts that mainstream users see without digging for crap) proudly on display to family and friends and the public, Real Name and photos attached.
      - twblalock 10y ago
        Lots of people are racist. That is a sufficient explanation. However, I very strongly suspect that no matter what the level of racism on Facebook is, it would be far higher if people were able to post anonymously.
        reitanqild 10y ago
        > However, I very strongly suspect that no matter what the level of racism on Facebook is, it would be far higher if people were able to post anonymously. Counterexample HN and arstechnica.com As I have previously hypothesised a lot of good users (me included) seems to be scared away by real names policies. Pseudonyms allowed and linked to phone numbers or national ids combined with karma seems like a workable middle ground for me.
    - rmc 10y ago
      > If racism becomes acceptable again Some would say that racism is still acceptable in USA today. Just look at Trump. (Yes not as openly as before, but it hasn't been erradicated) There's a saying that the USA went from thinking that racism was OK, to not knowing what racism is.
  - bloaf 10y ago
    Imagine that he never came into contact or communication with a person that he was racist against. E.g. a racist hermit.
    - brokenmachine 10y ago
      In that case, then who cares what his ideas are? If a racist hermit is racist in the woods, does he make an offensive sound?
    - afarrell 10y ago
      If a racist hermit never interacts directly with anyone, sure that is harmless. But if she actually just racially isolates herself (which is pretty hard to do in many parts of America), then she still has influence over the institutions around her. If someone then wants to join her racist gardening club, then her racism ends up affecting things.
  - adrianN 10y ago
    There are probably many people who are sexually attracted to children but don't act on these feelings in any way.
reitanqild 10y ago
I find HN and arstechnica.com a lot more civilized than the comments section on the major local newspaper. I have hypothesised that the reason is that without anonymity only * (trolls with) fake accounts * politically correct people and people who think they are pc * and people who don't care about real life reputation anyway post in any kind of controversial debate. Normal knowledgeable people doesn't want to lose the dream job because of something they commented on 5 years ago.
- nkurz 10y ago
  You missed: * naive idealists who believe that truth and reason matter more than immediate public perception This is subtly different than "people who don't care about real life reputation" in that they sincerely hope that despite any short term damage to reputation, in the long run others (or at least some subset) will come respect their honesty and rationality. I'm probably naive and idealist, but at least on HN, I think this is a significant group. Although, am I reading correctly that you are considering HN to be "without anonymity"? In the current "persistent pseudonymous" system, what do you think constitutes a "fake account"?
  - reitanqild 10y ago
    > Although, am I reading correctly that you are considering HN to be "without anonymity"? No. Sorry if unclear. I categorise HN accounts as pseudonymous with optional real life names. > In the current "persistent pseudonymous" system, what do you think constitutes a "fake account"? What would annoy me is real sockpuppet accounts, controlling more than one account and using it to * upvote ones own comments and postings * astroturf * using it as a strawman to defame opponents (i.e. by running a sock puppet account that seemingly supports some cases while posting bad arguments for that case etc.) * etc Personally I have nothing against using multiple accounts as long as there is a reason (i.e. someone has an account with full name and another that they use when they want to post or comment something that they do not want to reflect back on their real life persona, family and workplace.)
- DanBC 10y ago
  Many local newspaper comment sections have people posting vile things under their real names, often linked to their facebook accounts.
godshatter 10y ago
I don't think it's necessarily anonymous free speech that is the problem. I hang out occasionally on Freenet, on FMS and Sone specifically. Freenet is very anonymous by design. It turns out it is a mostly pleasant and helpful community. I think one good reason for that is that both FMS (which is a bulletin board system) and Sone (which is more like Facebook posts) use a version of a "web of trust". People you don't want to hear get filtered out, and others can trust your trust list and filter them out as well. Some people only filter out obvious abuse, others filter out more. Frost (another bulletin board system without a web of trust), on the other hand, is a downright awful place to go most of the time. I wonder how feasible it would be for Reddit to implement subreddit-based web of trusts for users, as opposed to moderation. People could filter others (or not) individually and not have to rely on someone else to try to filter for the whole group.

twblalock 10y ago

YouTube comments are what really does it for me.

lintiness 10y ago
tip of me fidora, m'lady
henrygrew 10y ago
That is where the real asshats are, i wonder how youtube is dealing with this.
- dcole2929 10y ago
  In short? They're not

InclinedPlane 10y ago

I think this is a mistaken impression. The problem, I think, is that we haven't figured out new norms and boundaries for online socialization, as we have for other forms of communication and other media. One of the things that makes online communication so potent is that it is not just easy but also near instantaneous with a global reach. But we have been slacking on building the tools to manage the problems inherent in that power. One of which is the concentration and distillation of harassment. A tiny group of people can generate a tremendous amount of harassment which, through the magic of modern communication technologies, automatically gets funneled to the receiver. Even, say, a million people worldwide is still a tiny fraction of all people in the world, let alone all people online (less than 0.1%), but if there were a million dedicated harassers online it would be a hellscape. In reality it only takes a few assholes to spoil the "mood" and the "fun" of interacting online in public, from a few dozen up to tens to hundreds of thousands. A minute but vocal, abusive, and provocative sub-group can easily change the entire tone of a conversation or change someone's experience using social media from good to bad. How many people sending you death threats and rape threats regularly would it take to sour your experience with social media? The real answer is: a very tiny number. Right now that very tiny number of agents provocateurs are having an outsized impact on online communities and communication platforms, because they are leveraging the power of vitriol, hate, and targeted harassment. And also precisely because the platform builders (whether it's facebook, twitter, or reddit) have been far behind in building tooling to help deal with these problems, and because the social norms haven't caught up with the behavior. Going back to the '90s and even the '80s it was common for, say, usenet newsreaders to have tools built in for ignoring posts from people you wanted to ignore, and the modern tools for such things are barely at that level, if they exist at all, despite the problem being even more difficult to tackle. Additionally, there were a lot more moderated communities back then, whereas today the norm is unmoderated communities. Just like the security problems of the early internet days we've largely been surviving based on luck and absence of dedicated attacks, and partly just due to ignorance of the worst that was actually happening. There are a lot of people who still don't think that harassment on the internet is a serious problem because they don't actually understand it all, having never experienced it in its most potent forms. The worst takeaway from this would be deciding that most people are garbage and socializing with other human beings is best avoided (online or off). That's a classic "stranger danger" overreaction. We need better tools on various platforms. We need more people speaking out about the badness of harassment online and for people to stop parroting the stupid line "oh, it's just online, you can ignore it, it's not real" or defending targeted personal harassment as any sort of defensible "free speech".

BurningFrog 10y ago

I have two (opposing) thoughts on that 1. We don't always want to express all our opinions and thoughts among people we know, because they carries significant social cost. So we end up saying a disproportionate amount of those things anonymously online. 2. It used to be that nobody had to listen to the outcasts and the lonely. People we don't enjoy being around. But now they can participate in online forums as much as anyone. In part, it's a good thing that these voices can be heard, and that they can find likeminded to talk to. But a lot of them are outcasts because they're jerks, and online we do have to listen to them.

CaptSpify 10y ago
I'll argue on having to listen to them. I'm all for free-speech, no matter how vile it is. I'm also all for self-controlled censorship, and tools to facilitate that. If you don't want to hear, say, racist bullshit, ignore it, and move on. If it becomes too noisy, create a filter, and move on. If it is still too noisy, it's probably a good sign that your not fitting in well with the community.