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

pixelgeek 5y ago
This is just another example of politicians using a tragedy to push an existing agenda. As noted in the article and in the comments here, most people don't have a problem posting hate under their own names. Who does like anonymity? Government dissidents. Reporters. Human rights workers and investigators.
chomp 5y ago
I don’t know… my Nextdoor group is pretty abusive to certain groups at times, and people post happily with their real life name and the rough area of where they live attached. Hate towards an individual person isn’t super common, but it happens. If this extrapolates, I can’t see removing anonymity doing much other than e.g. hurting LGBT groups online (imagine asking questions as a member of that group in a conservative community and forced to use your real name)
- formerly_proven 5y ago
  > I can’t see removing anonymity doing much other than e.g. hurting LGBT groups online (imagine asking questions as a member of that group in a conservative community and forced to use your real name) Consider that this could be one of the motivations behind the push for things like this.
  - colpabar 5y ago
    In all seriousness, do you really think that any current western government is anti-lgbt? Do you have any examples?
    - formerly_proven 5y ago
      I don't think you can generally expect LGBT support from western governments at large. However, I didn't actually mean the governments themselves with my comment above, but the various christian and puritan lobbying groups.
    - whimsicalism 5y ago
      Yes, in parts of Europe certainly and many state governments as well. Casual homophobia remained "in" in the US until at least 2010, which is not all that long ago.
    - tlholaday 5y ago
      Yes. Search “Public Facilities Privacy & Security Act North Carolina”
    - guerrilla 5y ago
      Why would it matter if it's a government if it's public? Also, yes, definitely. Hungary and Poland on the extreme end to start with but really all of the Catholic and Orthodox countries to some degree not to mention some US states and rural areas even in northern Europe...
- CapitalistCartr 5y ago
  Nextdoor has had enormous racism/bigotry problems. They have had to revamp a variety of their interfaces to minimize this problem. It's like they have to do A/B testing to minimize it. Real identity doesn't do anything to slow down the oblivious.
  - neartheplain 5y ago
    >Nextdoor has had enormous racism/bigotry problems. Could you provide some concrete examples? I've used Nextdoor regularly in three major US metropolitan areas, and I have yet to see anything like an "enormous racism/bigotry problem." If anything, I see sanctimonious neighbors calling each other racist at the drop of a hat.
  - Factorium 5y ago
    https://www.ojjdp.gov/ojstatbb/crime/ucr.asp?table_in=2&selYrs=2019&rdoGroups=1&rdoData=rp https://www.ojjdp.gov/ojstatbb/crime/ucr.asp?table_in=2&selY... 51% of Murder and nonnegligent manslaughter is committed by about 7% of the US population. This is directly from Government data. There are real biological factors identified for this discrepancy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monoamine_oxidase_A https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monoamine_oxidase_A
    - whimsicalism 5y ago
      The obvious factor behind this discrepancy is the distribution of resources in the real world, as well as the fact that organized violent drug crime is mostly operated out of black communities (again: poverty). This allele you've identified as the genetic reason for white superiority is most common among Asian men.
    - tristor 5y ago
      I think you are overstating your case, and I question the motivations for doing so. The vast majority of people with either the 2R or 3R allele have not committed any criminal acts, and in fact the 3R allele is heavily associated to the type of risk taking behavior that is often rewarded in society. There may be a correlation between those who end up committing criminal acts and their gene expression, but it alone is not a causative factor and it's completely unsupported by evidence to make such a claim. Stronger causative factors are environmental, such as poverty, which has a direct causative relationship with criminal behavior.
- NoraCodes 5y ago
  Yes, this is the conclusion of the article as well.
- throwaway879080 5y ago
  from my experience it's more dangerous to ask a question as a conservative in a pro-LGBTQ+ group
- Schiendelman 5y ago
  Nextdoor is a really interesting case because it limits the conversation to people in your immediate neighborhood. Because of that, it creates an inherent ingroup/outgroup dynamic that doesn’t exist on most social media. In other systems, you have to create that through some kind of signaling. As a result, that dynamic overwhelms other topics.
foolzcrow 5y ago
free and open societies don't use censorship. Dictators use it to crush opposition.
floatingatoll 5y ago
Seems worth trying, since we’ve never tried it before with the big social networks of today. We’ve been locked onto anonymity for decades now as a priority and we need more data for science to consider anyways.
SeanLuke 5y ago
Follow the broken logic. 1. "Banning anonymous social media accounts is not the answer to online abuse." 2. Primary section in support of #1 makes the far weaker claim: "Many abusers are not anonymous" 3. Primary support for #2 is the sentence: "However, research [link] shows that people using their real names perpetrate abuse and bullying too." 4. Linked article actually contains no scientific research, or even data gathering, on the topic at all. This was just a festival of bad argument.
heavyset_go 5y ago
Reducing anonymity is the solution to easier advertising and targeting, and convincing investors that your users and growth are organic and not bot-related. The "minimizing online abuse" aspect has always been PR.
saasaccount2 5y ago
totally agree, cyber-bullying is mostly due to anonymity, and technology is well developed, and hackers find their way to do heinous acts and hide behind, this type of abuse cannot simply be prevented by banning social media, the cause is deep within the society's roots.
- ydhdbridjnd 5y ago
  Not really on the anonymity front. I worked for an anti bullying children's charity back in the late noughties and we found that online bullying was often a continuation of real life bullying, and that kids who bullied online (and were generally trollish) were the same kids who did it in real life. Anonymity certainly didn't help a lot of the time, but it wasn't the cause.
- smolder 5y ago
  > totally agree, cyber-bullying is mostly due to anonymity That isn't the conclusion of the article at all. No one was proposing banning social media either.
- 999900000999 5y ago
  The actual solution is to limit your social media use unless you want to be subject to abuse. I only have my Facebook for friends to contact me via messenger. As well as it's original purpose, commenting on a ( real life )friend's engagement photos with a nice congrats. The moment you get into stuff The Facebook wasn't designed for; like actually meeting new people, arguing with strangers, etc , then you run into problems. I have some very strong personal beliefs regarding how I live my life. I don't need to argue them though. I also have various strong political/ societal beliefs. Again no need to argue them.
  - user-the-name 5y ago
    Why should you have to shut yourself away from a large section of modern daily life just to not be the subject of abuse? Why is not even an option to work to fix the abuse?
deadalus 5y ago
Banning anonymous social media accounts = good for authoritarian governments and corporations
- myfavoritedog 5y ago
  Authoritarian governments run troll farms that plague social media through anonymous accounts.
- smolder 5y ago
  "Anonymous" social media accounts can be tied back to a real person already a lot of the time. People are terrible about "doxing" themselves in places where pseudonyms are used. (Usually that's fine, since nobody is really out to get them and the sleuthing takes work.) In the case of certain governments, the account owner is likely identifiable near 100% of the time, with not much effort. Depending on what social media we're talking about, (and what corporations,) there may be corporations assembling pseudonym to identity mappings, too. Making a law that forbids anonymity does help authoritarians, but it's mostly formalizing what is already an unspoken rule: that you can't truly be anonymous online. Other parties can throw away knowledge of you, like logless VPNs or TOR, but its next to impossible to verify they really do that.
tlholaday 5y ago
moot (Chris Poole) Conjecture: bind anonymity to ephemerality for best results. Consider ten seconds persistence limit. Like short-term memory for the spoken word.
- footlose_3815 5y ago
  Yeah, Moot's legacy sure has been doing the world a lot of favors. You sure we should be referencing his logic?
  - polartx 5y ago
    I’d choose a world with his legacy over Zuck’s ten times out of ten.
  - HamburgerEmoji 5y ago
    4chan and the MSM are both despicable slime pits in their own ways, but 4chan is much more honest. If the corporate media decides some subject is taboo, or that some line of inquiry is banned in order to protect advertisers' profit, you'll still be able to find extremely strong signal about those topics on 4chan.
    - md8z 5y ago
      Anonymous sites like Blind and 4chan (and other semi-anonymous sites like Twitter and its clones) seem to have the same problem but in reverse, where everything is overloaded with negativity and creates that strong signal, even if it's unwarranted. There is a reason conspiracy theories, misinformation, racism, and other cynical rhetoric tend to spread so well on those sites. I think Twitter and Blind have improved their moderation recently... but 4chan seems to always be the same cesspool.
  - tlholaday 5y ago
    Yes, I am sure we should be referencing the logic of his proposal, and that we should consider that moot’s implementation of ephemerality on 4chan allowed too much persistence.
- 5y ago
footlose_3815 5y ago
It's a huge start
- tristanMatthias 5y ago
  How exactly?
  - est 5y ago
    It's a huge start towards Balkanized Internet. You can't have total de-anonymized Internet without blocking foreign user geneerated content. To ban foreign content, you got to install a China style national firewall.
polartx 5y ago
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?
- sharklazer 5y ago
  Nothing. They simply continue to propagate the surveillance state.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- colpabar 5y ago
  https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/oct/18/pm-urged-to-enact-davids-law-against-social-media-abuse-after-amesss-death 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 Southend West constituency, added: “I suggest that if we want to ensure that our colleague didn’t die in vain, we collectively all of us pick up the baton, regardless of our party and take the forthcoming online harms bill and toughen it up markedly. So there is absolutely no link between his murder and seemingly any online activity, but they're still going to use his murder to to justify... harsher punishment for being mean to government employees online? Never let a crisis go to waste I guess.
  - sharklazer 5y ago
    > So there is absolutely no link between his murder and seemingly any online activity, but they're still going to use his murder to to justify... harsher punishment for being mean to government employees online? Never let a crisis go to waste I guess. Hitting the nail on the head.
  - 5y ago
throwaway743 5y ago
Personally, I like not having to tie my identity to my HN account, and I'd like to keep it that way here and elsewhere.
- BitwiseFool 5y ago
  Same here. Besides, what I type here today may not be controversial at all, but who knows how activists will change what society sees as acceptable vs problematic? All it would take is one motivated activist to dig through my comment history and find something to get me cancelled in the future.
  - xkcd-sucks 5y ago
    "Enterprise software is totally fucked and working on it sucks, and b2b sales people are lying sociopaths. I just want to make more money with less effort and don't care about half-baked mission statements" If I weren't anonymous this could make me unemployable
    - AndyNemmity 5y ago
      Exactly. The net result is a complete hiding of the truth. Everywhere you go would be marketing vs. truth, because the truth is too dangerous.
sharklazer 5y ago
But it IS the answer to monitoring what everyone is saying, posting, and doing so the state can have its panopticon.
lionkor 5y ago
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 into groups in your mind no matter how hard you try. Anonymity mostly removes this bias, and leads to real and pure equal exchange of ideas.
- oxfordmale 5y ago
  I can see the pros and cons of anonymity. However, personally I would delete a lot of my social media accounts if they forced me to disclose my identity. The case of Monika at Stackoverflow suggest you have to be really careful when using your full name, even on reputable sites. Data miners would also absolutely love it and governments are powerless to act on abuse as many of these companies are outside an enforceable jurisdiction.
  - kodah 5y ago
    In case anyone else didn't know the story of Monica Cellio at StackOverflow it's a good one: https://cellio.medium.com/dear-stack-overflow-we-need-to-talk-13bf3f90204f https://cellio.medium.com/dear-stack-overflow-we-need-to-tal...
    - HWR_14 5y ago
      That doesn't seem to tell the story of Monica Cellio, but be a story written by her. One maddeningly vague, unless I want to start digging through tweets to uncover all the things she is alluding to.
    - oxfordmale 5y ago
      The important part is that Stack Exchange mentioned Monica Celio by name in a press release in a manner that was perceived to be defamatory by Monica. The original disagreement was about the CoC. That disagreement/misunderstanding should have been handled in private, there was no need to throw her under the bus
specialist 5y ago
No, there is no silver bullet. Yes, banning anonymity is dumb idea. Also, opt-in authenticated identity is necessary. It's ridiculous that bots, trolls, and sockpuppets are given the same esteem and protections as real people. To curtail harassment, nerf the outrage machine (algorithmic newsfeeds) and ad revenue biz models.
- xanaxagoras 5y ago
  Depends on the platform. On Reddit for example, I'd rather hear from the bots, trolls and sockpuppets.
  - specialist 5y ago
    Heh. Examples or recommendations? I'm fine with bots if they're obviously bots. I think it was US Senator Mark Warner that proposed that reform.
- colpabar 5y ago
  >It's ridiculous that bots, trolls, and sockpuppets are given the same esteem and protections as real people. Agreed. I think any talk of the problems of online anonymity should be focused on bots first and foremost. From my understanding, it's pretty easy to detect like 90% of bot users. Can't we go after those instead? I don't really care that real people online can be mean anonymously, because at the end of the day, it's just one person. But an army of bots? That has a much stronger affect, especially when they all amplify each other's posts and game the algorithms so that they get promoted and seen by more people. Any talk of the "dangers of online anonymity" that isn't about bots is just a deceptive way of arguing for more online surveillance. This example seems especially egregious, because they're somehow using an MP's murder to push it even though it has literally nothing to do with it.
  - whimsicalism 5y ago
    > I think any talk of the problems of online anonymity should be focused on bots first and foremost. From my understanding, it's pretty easy to detect like 90% of bot users. Can't we go after those instead? I don't really care that real people online can be mean anonymously, because at the end of the day, it's just one person. Strong disagree in that I think most of the problems people identify with FB are due to the collective actions of mostly real people in conversation.
m3kw9 5y ago
Social media needs make it closer to like you are talking to someone in real life. Probably better real ID verification.
AzzieElbab 5y ago
the most abuse I am seeing happening on Twitter originates from blue checks journalists and activists targeting political opponents. Targeting by randoms usually matches IRL statistics - Jews get most abuse, followed by women of all races. No other groups get even close. Also, politicians complaining about online abuse should not have become politicians in the first place.
bryan_w 5y ago
Not anonymity, but some method to ensure 1 "account" maps to exactly 1 person would go a long way to getting some sanity back. I don't care what you call yourself, as long as I'm sure you are a singular , real, person.
- anon22hdjsks 5y ago
  No thanks
showerst 5y ago
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, but it would vastly improve my online community experience to live without bots and more limited trolls. *edit to clarify* -- i don't want them to _have_ my ID, just use some kind of service from stripe or visa or whoever where they get a hash, so that banning is stickier.
- anon22hdjsks 5y ago
  Mods are the last people you want to give dox / location data to (especially if you have children).
- babyblueblanket 5y ago
  Do you trust a site like reddit to keep your government ID secure? I don't.
  - showerst 5y ago
    I was thinking more of a "verified by stripe" type flow. They just need a location and a hash that prevents multiple signups. I realize that's just moving the problem, but hey the whole idea is impractical anyway.
- BitwiseFool 5y ago
  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.
  - showerst 5y ago
    I suppose, although Parler came at it catering to a very specific and volatile community. "Don't get hacked and dump PII" is sort of a prerequisite for starting any online business these days, so I don't see that as a huge downside beyond the already comically difficult signup flow. Ideally, ID verification comes from someone like stripe or visa who's core business is handling that data, so the host is only storing a hash and a location.
onion2k 5y ago
There is one simple, easy way to stop abuse (both online and offline): stop accepting when your peers do it. There are more people who think abusive behavior is bad than there are abusers who think it's good. If all the people who think it's bad call it out when they see it, avoid people who do it, make a point admonishing people who do it, refuse to accept working with people who do it at work, refuse to socialize with people who do it in social situations, refuse to watch TV shows where it's shown to be funny, refuse to pay to see it at the cinema, and so on then, eventually, it would start to stop. Literally the only way to stop it is if society as a collective group makes it clear that it's not acceptable. Sadly this means we're stuck with it.
- babyblueblanket 5y ago
  The definition of abusive behavior is unfortunately ambiguous though. Not everybody agrees to it. That's how you get people claiming folks are too sensitive and other people claiming so and so is an abuser for some more ambiguous circumstance.
  - onion2k 5y ago
    That doesn't matter. If everyone just calls out the behavior that they think is abusive then eventually we'll get to a new, lower level of abuse. There'll be some contention where people disagree, but there is already so that doesn't change much.
criddell 5y ago
The first social media site I ever used was Slashdot and back then not only did they allow anonymous accounts but you could impersonate people. Mostly that was used to make jokes (like billg commenting on some Linux news). Then they added user accounts and a login. Anonymous posting persisted (the famous Anonymous Coward) but impersonating mostly stopped.
woeirua 5y ago
The simplest solution here is to require users to present government recognized credentials when signing up for accounts. Users can then create pseudonymous accounts that preserve some notion of anonymity, but when they become abusive the user can then be held accountable in the real world. Any solution here needs to be gated by the courts though, otherwise it would be ripe for abuse in and of itself through doxxing.
- anon22hdjsks 5y ago
  How is this "simple"? how do you imagine I would implement this to allow people to comment on my blog.
- C19is20 5y ago
  Imagine the effects of a data breach, though.
- wackro 5y ago
  I heard a discussion on the radio where a lady was describing the potential use of a third party identity provider for all social media. This would be instead of the government. If I understood it correctly, the third party would hold your ID etc, and would vouch for you on signup to services. Users would be anonymous/pseudonymous until a warrant was acquired by the police. A third party would be better IMO than the government. Not sure I like it either way tho. Who is the third party? Breaches would be an issue as the other poster has said. And too much like big brother.
  - BitwiseFool 5y ago
    I don't think having a third party instead of government control would be any better because the Snowden leaks showed us that the intelligence agencies will simply secretly co-opt the service to their own ends.
    - tzs 5y ago
      Instead of a third party make it shared among multiple third parties such that it requires agreement among N of the third parties to reveal an identity. Spread the third parties among jurisdictions and make N large enough that no government has enough of the third parties under its jurisdiction to be able to coerce an identity reveal.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
DrBazza 5y ago
I wish people would go back to cutting out letters in a newspaper and gluing them to a bit of paper and sending that. It took thought, effort, and wasn't a spur-of-the-moment thing. But in all seriousness, there are a lot of women (and men) who have suffered abuse by a partner. Not having anonymous social media accounts ends up being at the very least exclusionary, and at the very worst can lead to physical harm (even murder) by an abusive partner easily tracking someone down. The other elephant in the room here, is that abusive social media messages have nothing to do with the death of David Amess.
BitwiseFool 5y ago
I think society needs an avenue for anonymous self expression. Otherwise people will feel stifled and oppressed by having no outlet to go against cultural norms.
bigjimmyjohnson 5y ago
Why does there need to be one uniform solution? Some sites can be entirely anonymous, some can be pseudononymous, some with real names... some heavily moderated, some lightly moderated... some facilitating one on one conversation, some for small groups, some for the wider public... and so on. The web need not be homogenous. Omegle, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, hacker news... They can all exist differently and that's fine.
- StanislavPetrov 5y ago
  >Why does there need to be one uniform solution? Because free discourse cannot be completely stifled by the powers that be if there exists anywhere where people are allowed to express their honest opinions without fear of retribution.
thrownaway561 5y ago
The best thing is don't join social network or unjoin the ones you are on if you find them toxic. if you find a person toxic, almost every social platform has a way of blocking them. i use it all the time. life doesn't have to be stressful.
causi 5y ago
Online abuse is much easier to ignore when it's anonymous. What do I care if xX_BonerLord_420_Xx calls me the n-word? It only starts mattering when it's John Johnson, CPA and I have to drive by his house every day.
motohagiography 5y ago
Faint praise. The article does more to normalize and prime the idea of banning online anonymity with a weak defense than to argue against it. Some abstract principles about discredited freedoms won't stand in the way of progress. The sceptical are not alone.
pluto8195 5y ago
Could there be a way to guarantee that each account is "verified" ie: a real person, but still have the platform allow you to hide your identity to others
- schleck8 5y ago
  That would be labeled trojan horse for authoritarianism
- Cycl0ps 5y ago
  If someone can figure it out I'd love to see it. Having some way of preventing someone from making more than one account would be a tremendous help in my eyes. Whether you use your name or not, that account is you. If it gets removed, you're off the site. What I can't figure out is how you would do this while staying anonymous. If the users had some private key they could sign the account in some way to claim ownership without saying who they are, but then who issues and maintains the private keys? You'd need some large body to issue them, and that means storing personal data to know who has and hasn't been issued a key.
- willhinsa 5y ago
  This comment talks about this idea: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28947131 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28947131
travisgriggs 5y ago
Why not go the other way, and make all social broadcasts be anonymous? Then we would talk about policies instead of personalities. It just becomes ideas and thoughts in the cloud.
- dane-pgp 5y ago
  "Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people."
  - travisgriggs 5y ago
    Has the internet degraded along these lines over the years? In the beginning, largely unknown (essentially anonymous) people discussed technical things. The net felt like a cool place. I was enlightened by it. And then as more people showed up, news outlets pivoted more and more to keep us up to date with what was happening via the internet. Families took to keeping family blogs to share news with each other. Now days, it's largely a platform to build and promote cult personalities.
  - psyc 5y ago
    I once made the rookie mistake of repeating this quote to my SO when they tried to engage me in gossip. Wow that did not go over.
UIUC_06 5y ago
Pro tip: when you see a string of mush words, like navigate, negotiate, access, pathways, marginalized, manifest, and discourse, you can safely skip the article.
anyonecancode 5y ago
I think the relevant property is not anonymity, it's accountability. The argument against anonymity is that it will make people more accountable, but that's not always true. Rather, it's the way an online community structures itself. For instance, here on HN we have the ability to be anonymous (on a sliding scale -- people can say who they are in their profiles, or be completely anonymous, or somewhere in between, posting contact info so that with effort they can be tied to their offline identity). But compared to many online communities, there's very little abuse here, and I'd argue that's because there's accountability -- there are clear standards, and those are enforced both by the moderators and by the community itself. Whether you post as yourself, fully anonymously, or somewhere in between, there's a community standard that hold you accountable for your posts. I, personally, highly value the ability to have online identities somewhat separate from my offline one. I'm not trying to hide anything, I simply find it freeing to be able to enter a community without dragging around the weight of previous personal history, and to be able to establish an identity specific to that community I'm participating in. I always found this one of the amazing things about the internet, and I've been saddened to see that undermined. At the same time, I absolutely try to be accountable for what I say online, I expect others to hold me to that, and I hold others to that standard. None of this requires I know someone's "real" name, or that they know mine.
- vorpalhex 5y ago
  Part of why this works on HN is our small size. I will almost certainly bump into you again on here, and likely have before. Prisoner's dilemma is altered when it's a repeated trust action.
  - pixelgeek 5y ago
    Back in the 'olden days' you almost always knew the people in your groups and knew the trolls. Heck you sometimes knew who the trolls in other groups were. Then AOL came and ruined it for everyone. Millions of new people. No-one read the rules and the quality of content went down precipitously. And that news group apocalypse now seems quaint in comparison to Facebook and Twitter.
LongTimeAnon 5y ago
Long-time anon here. You will need a team of data scientists to express the formula capable of counting how many websites, social media, forums, and entire internets I've been banned from. And yet, here I still stand. You think banning deprived me of influence or participating in the conversation. And yet, here I still stand. You think that we can't get you addicted to banning people. That we can't make you fixate on trees and ignore the forest you leave aflame in your wake. All in the name to hunt us. And yet, here I still stand. You think we can't steer the conversation by making your new addiction to censorship the center piece of our influence operations. And yet, here I still stand. We taken the eternal flame war between overeducated face-saving keyboard activists and trolls from BBSs and over the course of decades, scaled it to consume the entirety of actual meat space. And you, dedicated banners, have always opted in, telling yourself that with greater scale, you can finally defeat us. And yet, here I still stand. You will never overcome your addiction to censorship. We control you. We own you. You slash and burn everything you touch and we steer you into our political enemies at will. And when you have finally made so many enemies that they retaliate against you, here I still stand in the aftermath. You will never defeat the long-time anons. You are our servants.
loydb 5y ago
Banning may not be the complete answer, but until we're allowed to shoot them, it will have to do.
teddyh 5y ago
For anyone wanting a more complete list: https://geekfeminism.wikia.org/wiki/Who_is_harmed_by_a_%22Real_Names%22_policy%3F https://geekfeminism.wikia.org/wiki/Who_is_harmed_by_a_%22Re...
_0ffh 5y ago
>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 dissemination of information and opinions was firmly in the hands of a feudalistic elite until just a few decades ago. The fact that the masses are no more just bonded serfs in the information ecology has finally firmly arrived in the minds of the feudal lords and they are pushing back to preserve their powers to guide public opinion by interpretation ex cathedra. Strap in firmly everybody, we are about to enter stormy waters - the enlightenment 2.0 is afoot, methinks!
- HWR_14 5y ago
  You think the push to deanonymize is to censor people? It's to extract more value from them. It's for more ads, more dynamic pricing, etc. Meanwhile, the enlightenment was specifically when a wide variety of viewpoints started getting published.
  - throw63738 5y ago
    Is deanonymization going to drive more engagement?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - _0ffh 5y ago
    >It's to extract more value from them. It's for more ads, more dynamic pricing, etc. Yes, this is a good point. But in my mind this is more of an incidental convenience, not the primary reason. >Meanwhile, the enlightenment was specifically when a wide variety of viewpoints started getting published. Exactly! And when was it easier than now, or even possible, to get access to practically the whole variety of viewpoints? Everyone can now play an active part in the conversation with barely any barriers at all.
high_5 5y ago
Banning anonymous social media accounts would just amplify the similar behaviour to swatting.
ls15 5y ago
Where real data is required, why can't I see the names of all people who have access to my data and get notified when someone does access it or creates a copy of it. They look at my data after all. Shouldn't I know who is looking at my data, where exactly it is stored, how many copies exist and when it will be deleted? The relationship between a data-collecting website and its users is very asymmetric when it comes to data. Using the web as anonymously as possible is my only real defense against getting my data abused.
lemoncookiechip 5y ago
This just sounds ripe for abuse. Data mining, doxxing, swatting, more and more aggressive ads, identity theft and so on. Are people toxic on the internet (not just social media)? Yes. Does changing it so people have no protection or privacy change things? It instills fears in them, yes, but does it change human nature? No. The internet is just a reflection of what we are has a collective. You might not want to admit that we're twisted little things while also being altruistic and creative, but that's what we are, and saying mean things online shouldn't be punishable. Using this privacy to do other less savory things is a whole other issue, but they'll happen regardless and that's why we have people with the authority and tools to persecute those people. Also, I find it amusing that half the people defending this are also using online usernames with no photo or personal information directly attached to their account (maybe they have it somewhere or they'll give it to you if you ask nicely).
- jcun4128 5y ago
  > also using online usernames with no photo or personal information haha I feel the bias like when I get a downvote "what did I do wrong, conform". I'm not denying intelligence/facts and also I think it's "this is not Reddit" kind of thing.
throwawayapples 5y ago
For those of us who believe banning anonymity is an answer to anything, please ask yourself how you would feel if this site did that -- or even, in fact, if HN didn't actually make anon accounts (without even requiring an email confirmation) so easy that it's an incredibly common occurrence. 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?
TurkishPoptart 5y ago
Anonymity is more important that ever. I'm glad most of the things I've written online and on message boards were under total pseudonyms, because if those messages were retrieved 20-30 years later, I could be "canceled" for anything, depending the social mores of the time of retrieval.
gtvwill 5y ago
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.
anonypla 5y ago
BTW https://anonymousplanet.org https://anonymousplanet.org
mcguire 5y ago
Weirdly, I just submitted https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28946349 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28946349 earlier today: Evaluating the Effectiveness of Deplatforming as a Moderation Strategy on Twitter.
luxuryballs 5y ago
This is such a first world problem, when everything is going pretty well we must stop people from hating each other online!
dang 5y ago
Url changed from https://phys.org/news/2021-10-anonymous-social-media-accounts-online.html https://phys.org/news/2021-10-anonymous-social-media-account..., which points to this.
adminscoffee 5y ago
governments will ban anonymous accounts and the create fake people to push their own incentive

This is just another example of politicians using a tragedy to push an existing agenda. As noted in the article and in the comments here, most people don't have a problem posting hate under their own names. Who does like anonymity? Government dissidents. Reporters. Human rights workers and investigators.

chomp 5y ago

I don’t know… my Nextdoor group is pretty abusive to certain groups at times, and people post happily with their real life name and the rough area of where they live attached. Hate towards an individual person isn’t super common, but it happens. If this extrapolates, I can’t see removing anonymity doing much other than e.g. hurting LGBT groups online (imagine asking questions as a member of that group in a conservative community and forced to use your real name)

formerly_proven 5y ago
> I can’t see removing anonymity doing much other than e.g. hurting LGBT groups online (imagine asking questions as a member of that group in a conservative community and forced to use your real name) Consider that this could be one of the motivations behind the push for things like this.
- colpabar 5y ago
  In all seriousness, do you really think that any current western government is anti-lgbt? Do you have any examples?
  - formerly_proven 5y ago
    I don't think you can generally expect LGBT support from western governments at large. However, I didn't actually mean the governments themselves with my comment above, but the various christian and puritan lobbying groups.
  - whimsicalism 5y ago
    Yes, in parts of Europe certainly and many state governments as well. Casual homophobia remained "in" in the US until at least 2010, which is not all that long ago.
  - tlholaday 5y ago
    Yes. Search “Public Facilities Privacy & Security Act North Carolina”
  - guerrilla 5y ago
    Why would it matter if it's a government if it's public? Also, yes, definitely. Hungary and Poland on the extreme end to start with but really all of the Catholic and Orthodox countries to some degree not to mention some US states and rural areas even in northern Europe...
CapitalistCartr 5y ago
Nextdoor has had enormous racism/bigotry problems. They have had to revamp a variety of their interfaces to minimize this problem. It's like they have to do A/B testing to minimize it. Real identity doesn't do anything to slow down the oblivious.
- neartheplain 5y ago
  >Nextdoor has had enormous racism/bigotry problems. Could you provide some concrete examples? I've used Nextdoor regularly in three major US metropolitan areas, and I have yet to see anything like an "enormous racism/bigotry problem." If anything, I see sanctimonious neighbors calling each other racist at the drop of a hat.
- Factorium 5y ago
  https://www.ojjdp.gov/ojstatbb/crime/ucr.asp?table_in=2&selYrs=2019&rdoGroups=1&rdoData=rp https://www.ojjdp.gov/ojstatbb/crime/ucr.asp?table_in=2&selY... 51% of Murder and nonnegligent manslaughter is committed by about 7% of the US population. This is directly from Government data. There are real biological factors identified for this discrepancy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monoamine_oxidase_A https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monoamine_oxidase_A
  - whimsicalism 5y ago
    The obvious factor behind this discrepancy is the distribution of resources in the real world, as well as the fact that organized violent drug crime is mostly operated out of black communities (again: poverty). This allele you've identified as the genetic reason for white superiority is most common among Asian men.
  - tristor 5y ago
    I think you are overstating your case, and I question the motivations for doing so. The vast majority of people with either the 2R or 3R allele have not committed any criminal acts, and in fact the 3R allele is heavily associated to the type of risk taking behavior that is often rewarded in society. There may be a correlation between those who end up committing criminal acts and their gene expression, but it alone is not a causative factor and it's completely unsupported by evidence to make such a claim. Stronger causative factors are environmental, such as poverty, which has a direct causative relationship with criminal behavior.
NoraCodes 5y ago
Yes, this is the conclusion of the article as well.
throwaway879080 5y ago
from my experience it's more dangerous to ask a question as a conservative in a pro-LGBTQ+ group
Schiendelman 5y ago
Nextdoor is a really interesting case because it limits the conversation to people in your immediate neighborhood. Because of that, it creates an inherent ingroup/outgroup dynamic that doesn’t exist on most social media. In other systems, you have to create that through some kind of signaling. As a result, that dynamic overwhelms other topics.

foolzcrow 5y ago

free and open societies don't use censorship. Dictators use it to crush opposition.

floatingatoll 5y ago

Seems worth trying, since we’ve never tried it before with the big social networks of today. We’ve been locked onto anonymity for decades now as a priority and we need more data for science to consider anyways.

SeanLuke 5y ago

Follow the broken logic. 1. "Banning anonymous social media accounts is not the answer to online abuse." 2. Primary section in support of #1 makes the far weaker claim: "Many abusers are not anonymous" 3. Primary support for #2 is the sentence: "However, research [link] shows that people using their real names perpetrate abuse and bullying too." 4. Linked article actually contains no scientific research, or even data gathering, on the topic at all. This was just a festival of bad argument.

heavyset_go 5y ago

Reducing anonymity is the solution to easier advertising and targeting, and convincing investors that your users and growth are organic and not bot-related. The "minimizing online abuse" aspect has always been PR.

saasaccount2 5y ago

totally agree, cyber-bullying is mostly due to anonymity, and technology is well developed, and hackers find their way to do heinous acts and hide behind, this type of abuse cannot simply be prevented by banning social media, the cause is deep within the society's roots.

ydhdbridjnd 5y ago
Not really on the anonymity front. I worked for an anti bullying children's charity back in the late noughties and we found that online bullying was often a continuation of real life bullying, and that kids who bullied online (and were generally trollish) were the same kids who did it in real life. Anonymity certainly didn't help a lot of the time, but it wasn't the cause.
smolder 5y ago
> totally agree, cyber-bullying is mostly due to anonymity That isn't the conclusion of the article at all. No one was proposing banning social media either.
999900000999 5y ago
The actual solution is to limit your social media use unless you want to be subject to abuse. I only have my Facebook for friends to contact me via messenger. As well as it's original purpose, commenting on a ( real life )friend's engagement photos with a nice congrats. The moment you get into stuff The Facebook wasn't designed for; like actually meeting new people, arguing with strangers, etc , then you run into problems. I have some very strong personal beliefs regarding how I live my life. I don't need to argue them though. I also have various strong political/ societal beliefs. Again no need to argue them.
- user-the-name 5y ago
  Why should you have to shut yourself away from a large section of modern daily life just to not be the subject of abuse? Why is not even an option to work to fix the abuse?

deadalus 5y ago

Banning anonymous social media accounts = good for authoritarian governments and corporations

myfavoritedog 5y ago
Authoritarian governments run troll farms that plague social media through anonymous accounts.
smolder 5y ago
"Anonymous" social media accounts can be tied back to a real person already a lot of the time. People are terrible about "doxing" themselves in places where pseudonyms are used. (Usually that's fine, since nobody is really out to get them and the sleuthing takes work.) In the case of certain governments, the account owner is likely identifiable near 100% of the time, with not much effort. Depending on what social media we're talking about, (and what corporations,) there may be corporations assembling pseudonym to identity mappings, too. Making a law that forbids anonymity does help authoritarians, but it's mostly formalizing what is already an unspoken rule: that you can't truly be anonymous online. Other parties can throw away knowledge of you, like logless VPNs or TOR, but its next to impossible to verify they really do that.

tlholaday 5y ago

moot (Chris Poole) Conjecture: bind anonymity to ephemerality for best results. Consider ten seconds persistence limit. Like short-term memory for the spoken word.

footlose_3815 5y ago
Yeah, Moot's legacy sure has been doing the world a lot of favors. You sure we should be referencing his logic?
- polartx 5y ago
  I’d choose a world with his legacy over Zuck’s ten times out of ten.
- HamburgerEmoji 5y ago
  4chan and the MSM are both despicable slime pits in their own ways, but 4chan is much more honest. If the corporate media decides some subject is taboo, or that some line of inquiry is banned in order to protect advertisers' profit, you'll still be able to find extremely strong signal about those topics on 4chan.
  - md8z 5y ago
    Anonymous sites like Blind and 4chan (and other semi-anonymous sites like Twitter and its clones) seem to have the same problem but in reverse, where everything is overloaded with negativity and creates that strong signal, even if it's unwarranted. There is a reason conspiracy theories, misinformation, racism, and other cynical rhetoric tend to spread so well on those sites. I think Twitter and Blind have improved their moderation recently... but 4chan seems to always be the same cesspool.
- tlholaday 5y ago
  Yes, I am sure we should be referencing the logic of his proposal, and that we should consider that moot’s implementation of ephemerality on 4chan allowed too much persistence.
5y ago

footlose_3815 5y ago

It's a huge start

tristanMatthias 5y ago
How exactly?
- est 5y ago
  It's a huge start towards Balkanized Internet. You can't have total de-anonymized Internet without blocking foreign user geneerated content. To ban foreign content, you got to install a China style national firewall.

polartx 5y ago

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?

sharklazer 5y ago
Nothing. They simply continue to propagate the surveillance state.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
colpabar 5y ago
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/oct/18/pm-urged-to-enact-davids-law-against-social-media-abuse-after-amesss-death 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 Southend West constituency, added: “I suggest that if we want to ensure that our colleague didn’t die in vain, we collectively all of us pick up the baton, regardless of our party and take the forthcoming online harms bill and toughen it up markedly. So there is absolutely no link between his murder and seemingly any online activity, but they're still going to use his murder to to justify... harsher punishment for being mean to government employees online? Never let a crisis go to waste I guess.
- sharklazer 5y ago
  > So there is absolutely no link between his murder and seemingly any online activity, but they're still going to use his murder to to justify... harsher punishment for being mean to government employees online? Never let a crisis go to waste I guess. Hitting the nail on the head.
- 5y ago

throwaway743 5y ago

Personally, I like not having to tie my identity to my HN account, and I'd like to keep it that way here and elsewhere.

BitwiseFool 5y ago
Same here. Besides, what I type here today may not be controversial at all, but who knows how activists will change what society sees as acceptable vs problematic? All it would take is one motivated activist to dig through my comment history and find something to get me cancelled in the future.
- xkcd-sucks 5y ago
  "Enterprise software is totally fucked and working on it sucks, and b2b sales people are lying sociopaths. I just want to make more money with less effort and don't care about half-baked mission statements" If I weren't anonymous this could make me unemployable
  - AndyNemmity 5y ago
    Exactly. The net result is a complete hiding of the truth. Everywhere you go would be marketing vs. truth, because the truth is too dangerous.

sharklazer 5y ago

But it IS the answer to monitoring what everyone is saying, posting, and doing so the state can have its panopticon.

lionkor 5y ago

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 into groups in your mind no matter how hard you try. Anonymity mostly removes this bias, and leads to real and pure equal exchange of ideas.

oxfordmale 5y ago
I can see the pros and cons of anonymity. However, personally I would delete a lot of my social media accounts if they forced me to disclose my identity. The case of Monika at Stackoverflow suggest you have to be really careful when using your full name, even on reputable sites. Data miners would also absolutely love it and governments are powerless to act on abuse as many of these companies are outside an enforceable jurisdiction.
- kodah 5y ago
  In case anyone else didn't know the story of Monica Cellio at StackOverflow it's a good one: https://cellio.medium.com/dear-stack-overflow-we-need-to-talk-13bf3f90204f https://cellio.medium.com/dear-stack-overflow-we-need-to-tal...
  - HWR_14 5y ago
    That doesn't seem to tell the story of Monica Cellio, but be a story written by her. One maddeningly vague, unless I want to start digging through tweets to uncover all the things she is alluding to.
  - oxfordmale 5y ago
    The important part is that Stack Exchange mentioned Monica Celio by name in a press release in a manner that was perceived to be defamatory by Monica. The original disagreement was about the CoC. That disagreement/misunderstanding should have been handled in private, there was no need to throw her under the bus

specialist 5y ago

No, there is no silver bullet. Yes, banning anonymity is dumb idea. Also, opt-in authenticated identity is necessary. It's ridiculous that bots, trolls, and sockpuppets are given the same esteem and protections as real people. To curtail harassment, nerf the outrage machine (algorithmic newsfeeds) and ad revenue biz models.

xanaxagoras 5y ago
Depends on the platform. On Reddit for example, I'd rather hear from the bots, trolls and sockpuppets.
- specialist 5y ago
  Heh. Examples or recommendations? I'm fine with bots if they're obviously bots. I think it was US Senator Mark Warner that proposed that reform.
colpabar 5y ago
>It's ridiculous that bots, trolls, and sockpuppets are given the same esteem and protections as real people. Agreed. I think any talk of the problems of online anonymity should be focused on bots first and foremost. From my understanding, it's pretty easy to detect like 90% of bot users. Can't we go after those instead? I don't really care that real people online can be mean anonymously, because at the end of the day, it's just one person. But an army of bots? That has a much stronger affect, especially when they all amplify each other's posts and game the algorithms so that they get promoted and seen by more people. Any talk of the "dangers of online anonymity" that isn't about bots is just a deceptive way of arguing for more online surveillance. This example seems especially egregious, because they're somehow using an MP's murder to push it even though it has literally nothing to do with it.
- whimsicalism 5y ago
  > I think any talk of the problems of online anonymity should be focused on bots first and foremost. From my understanding, it's pretty easy to detect like 90% of bot users. Can't we go after those instead? I don't really care that real people online can be mean anonymously, because at the end of the day, it's just one person. Strong disagree in that I think most of the problems people identify with FB are due to the collective actions of mostly real people in conversation.

m3kw9 5y ago

Social media needs make it closer to like you are talking to someone in real life. Probably better real ID verification.

AzzieElbab 5y ago

the most abuse I am seeing happening on Twitter originates from blue checks journalists and activists targeting political opponents. Targeting by randoms usually matches IRL statistics - Jews get most abuse, followed by women of all races. No other groups get even close. Also, politicians complaining about online abuse should not have become politicians in the first place.

bryan_w 5y ago

Not anonymity, but some method to ensure 1 "account" maps to exactly 1 person would go a long way to getting some sanity back. I don't care what you call yourself, as long as I'm sure you are a singular , real, person.

anon22hdjsks 5y ago
No thanks

showerst 5y ago

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, but it would vastly improve my online community experience to live without bots and more limited trolls. *edit to clarify* -- i don't want them to _have_ my ID, just use some kind of service from stripe or visa or whoever where they get a hash, so that banning is stickier.

anon22hdjsks 5y ago
Mods are the last people you want to give dox / location data to (especially if you have children).
babyblueblanket 5y ago
Do you trust a site like reddit to keep your government ID secure? I don't.
- showerst 5y ago
  I was thinking more of a "verified by stripe" type flow. They just need a location and a hash that prevents multiple signups. I realize that's just moving the problem, but hey the whole idea is impractical anyway.
BitwiseFool 5y ago
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.
- showerst 5y ago
  I suppose, although Parler came at it catering to a very specific and volatile community. "Don't get hacked and dump PII" is sort of a prerequisite for starting any online business these days, so I don't see that as a huge downside beyond the already comically difficult signup flow. Ideally, ID verification comes from someone like stripe or visa who's core business is handling that data, so the host is only storing a hash and a location.

onion2k 5y ago

There is one simple, easy way to stop abuse (both online and offline): stop accepting when your peers do it. There are more people who think abusive behavior is bad than there are abusers who think it's good. If all the people who think it's bad call it out when they see it, avoid people who do it, make a point admonishing people who do it, refuse to accept working with people who do it at work, refuse to socialize with people who do it in social situations, refuse to watch TV shows where it's shown to be funny, refuse to pay to see it at the cinema, and so on then, eventually, it would start to stop. Literally the only way to stop it is if society as a collective group makes it clear that it's not acceptable. Sadly this means we're stuck with it.

babyblueblanket 5y ago
The definition of abusive behavior is unfortunately ambiguous though. Not everybody agrees to it. That's how you get people claiming folks are too sensitive and other people claiming so and so is an abuser for some more ambiguous circumstance.
- onion2k 5y ago
  That doesn't matter. If everyone just calls out the behavior that they think is abusive then eventually we'll get to a new, lower level of abuse. There'll be some contention where people disagree, but there is already so that doesn't change much.

criddell 5y ago

The first social media site I ever used was Slashdot and back then not only did they allow anonymous accounts but you could impersonate people. Mostly that was used to make jokes (like billg commenting on some Linux news). Then they added user accounts and a login. Anonymous posting persisted (the famous Anonymous Coward) but impersonating mostly stopped.

woeirua 5y ago

The simplest solution here is to require users to present government recognized credentials when signing up for accounts. Users can then create pseudonymous accounts that preserve some notion of anonymity, but when they become abusive the user can then be held accountable in the real world. Any solution here needs to be gated by the courts though, otherwise it would be ripe for abuse in and of itself through doxxing.

anon22hdjsks 5y ago
How is this "simple"? how do you imagine I would implement this to allow people to comment on my blog.
C19is20 5y ago
Imagine the effects of a data breach, though.
wackro 5y ago
I heard a discussion on the radio where a lady was describing the potential use of a third party identity provider for all social media. This would be instead of the government. If I understood it correctly, the third party would hold your ID etc, and would vouch for you on signup to services. Users would be anonymous/pseudonymous until a warrant was acquired by the police. A third party would be better IMO than the government. Not sure I like it either way tho. Who is the third party? Breaches would be an issue as the other poster has said. And too much like big brother.
- BitwiseFool 5y ago
  I don't think having a third party instead of government control would be any better because the Snowden leaks showed us that the intelligence agencies will simply secretly co-opt the service to their own ends.
  - tzs 5y ago
    Instead of a third party make it shared among multiple third parties such that it requires agreement among N of the third parties to reveal an identity. Spread the third parties among jurisdictions and make N large enough that no government has enough of the third parties under its jurisdiction to be able to coerce an identity reveal.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

DrBazza 5y ago

I wish people would go back to cutting out letters in a newspaper and gluing them to a bit of paper and sending that. It took thought, effort, and wasn't a spur-of-the-moment thing. But in all seriousness, there are a lot of women (and men) who have suffered abuse by a partner. Not having anonymous social media accounts ends up being at the very least exclusionary, and at the very worst can lead to physical harm (even murder) by an abusive partner easily tracking someone down. The other elephant in the room here, is that abusive social media messages have nothing to do with the death of David Amess.

BitwiseFool 5y ago

I think society needs an avenue for anonymous self expression. Otherwise people will feel stifled and oppressed by having no outlet to go against cultural norms.

bigjimmyjohnson 5y ago

Why does there need to be one uniform solution? Some sites can be entirely anonymous, some can be pseudononymous, some with real names... some heavily moderated, some lightly moderated... some facilitating one on one conversation, some for small groups, some for the wider public... and so on. The web need not be homogenous. Omegle, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, hacker news... They can all exist differently and that's fine.

StanislavPetrov 5y ago
>Why does there need to be one uniform solution? Because free discourse cannot be completely stifled by the powers that be if there exists anywhere where people are allowed to express their honest opinions without fear of retribution.

thrownaway561 5y ago

The best thing is don't join social network or unjoin the ones you are on if you find them toxic. if you find a person toxic, almost every social platform has a way of blocking them. i use it all the time. life doesn't have to be stressful.

causi 5y ago

Online abuse is much easier to ignore when it's anonymous. What do I care if xX_BonerLord_420_Xx calls me the n-word? It only starts mattering when it's John Johnson, CPA and I have to drive by his house every day.

motohagiography 5y ago

Faint praise. The article does more to normalize and prime the idea of banning online anonymity with a weak defense than to argue against it. Some abstract principles about discredited freedoms won't stand in the way of progress. The sceptical are not alone.

pluto8195 5y ago

Could there be a way to guarantee that each account is "verified" ie: a real person, but still have the platform allow you to hide your identity to others

schleck8 5y ago
That would be labeled trojan horse for authoritarianism
Cycl0ps 5y ago
If someone can figure it out I'd love to see it. Having some way of preventing someone from making more than one account would be a tremendous help in my eyes. Whether you use your name or not, that account is you. If it gets removed, you're off the site. What I can't figure out is how you would do this while staying anonymous. If the users had some private key they could sign the account in some way to claim ownership without saying who they are, but then who issues and maintains the private keys? You'd need some large body to issue them, and that means storing personal data to know who has and hasn't been issued a key.
willhinsa 5y ago
This comment talks about this idea: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28947131 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28947131

travisgriggs 5y ago

Why not go the other way, and make all social broadcasts be anonymous? Then we would talk about policies instead of personalities. It just becomes ideas and thoughts in the cloud.

dane-pgp 5y ago
"Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people."
- travisgriggs 5y ago
  Has the internet degraded along these lines over the years? In the beginning, largely unknown (essentially anonymous) people discussed technical things. The net felt like a cool place. I was enlightened by it. And then as more people showed up, news outlets pivoted more and more to keep us up to date with what was happening via the internet. Families took to keeping family blogs to share news with each other. Now days, it's largely a platform to build and promote cult personalities.
- psyc 5y ago
  I once made the rookie mistake of repeating this quote to my SO when they tried to engage me in gossip. Wow that did not go over.

UIUC_06 5y ago

Pro tip: when you see a string of mush words, like navigate, negotiate, access, pathways, marginalized, manifest, and discourse, you can safely skip the article.

anyonecancode 5y ago

I think the relevant property is not anonymity, it's accountability. The argument against anonymity is that it will make people more accountable, but that's not always true. Rather, it's the way an online community structures itself. For instance, here on HN we have the ability to be anonymous (on a sliding scale -- people can say who they are in their profiles, or be completely anonymous, or somewhere in between, posting contact info so that with effort they can be tied to their offline identity). But compared to many online communities, there's very little abuse here, and I'd argue that's because there's accountability -- there are clear standards, and those are enforced both by the moderators and by the community itself. Whether you post as yourself, fully anonymously, or somewhere in between, there's a community standard that hold you accountable for your posts. I, personally, highly value the ability to have online identities somewhat separate from my offline one. I'm not trying to hide anything, I simply find it freeing to be able to enter a community without dragging around the weight of previous personal history, and to be able to establish an identity specific to that community I'm participating in. I always found this one of the amazing things about the internet, and I've been saddened to see that undermined. At the same time, I absolutely try to be accountable for what I say online, I expect others to hold me to that, and I hold others to that standard. None of this requires I know someone's "real" name, or that they know mine.

vorpalhex 5y ago
Part of why this works on HN is our small size. I will almost certainly bump into you again on here, and likely have before. Prisoner's dilemma is altered when it's a repeated trust action.
- pixelgeek 5y ago
  Back in the 'olden days' you almost always knew the people in your groups and knew the trolls. Heck you sometimes knew who the trolls in other groups were. Then AOL came and ruined it for everyone. Millions of new people. No-one read the rules and the quality of content went down precipitously. And that news group apocalypse now seems quaint in comparison to Facebook and Twitter.

LongTimeAnon 5y ago

Long-time anon here. You will need a team of data scientists to express the formula capable of counting how many websites, social media, forums, and entire internets I've been banned from. And yet, here I still stand. You think banning deprived me of influence or participating in the conversation. And yet, here I still stand. You think that we can't get you addicted to banning people. That we can't make you fixate on trees and ignore the forest you leave aflame in your wake. All in the name to hunt us. And yet, here I still stand. You think we can't steer the conversation by making your new addiction to censorship the center piece of our influence operations. And yet, here I still stand. We taken the eternal flame war between overeducated face-saving keyboard activists and trolls from BBSs and over the course of decades, scaled it to consume the entirety of actual meat space. And you, dedicated banners, have always opted in, telling yourself that with greater scale, you can finally defeat us. And yet, here I still stand. You will never overcome your addiction to censorship. We control you. We own you. You slash and burn everything you touch and we steer you into our political enemies at will. And when you have finally made so many enemies that they retaliate against you, here I still stand in the aftermath. You will never defeat the long-time anons. You are our servants.

loydb 5y ago

Banning may not be the complete answer, but until we're allowed to shoot them, it will have to do.

teddyh 5y ago

For anyone wanting a more complete list: https://geekfeminism.wikia.org/wiki/Who_is_harmed_by_a_%22Real_Names%22_policy%3F https://geekfeminism.wikia.org/wiki/Who_is_harmed_by_a_%22Re...

_0ffh 5y ago

>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 dissemination of information and opinions was firmly in the hands of a feudalistic elite until just a few decades ago. The fact that the masses are no more just bonded serfs in the information ecology has finally firmly arrived in the minds of the feudal lords and they are pushing back to preserve their powers to guide public opinion by interpretation ex cathedra. Strap in firmly everybody, we are about to enter stormy waters - the enlightenment 2.0 is afoot, methinks!

HWR_14 5y ago
You think the push to deanonymize is to censor people? It's to extract more value from them. It's for more ads, more dynamic pricing, etc. Meanwhile, the enlightenment was specifically when a wide variety of viewpoints started getting published.
- throw63738 5y ago
  Is deanonymization going to drive more engagement?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- _0ffh 5y ago
  >It's to extract more value from them. It's for more ads, more dynamic pricing, etc. Yes, this is a good point. But in my mind this is more of an incidental convenience, not the primary reason. >Meanwhile, the enlightenment was specifically when a wide variety of viewpoints started getting published. Exactly! And when was it easier than now, or even possible, to get access to practically the whole variety of viewpoints? Everyone can now play an active part in the conversation with barely any barriers at all.

high_5 5y ago

Banning anonymous social media accounts would just amplify the similar behaviour to swatting.

ls15 5y ago

Where real data is required, why can't I see the names of all people who have access to my data and get notified when someone does access it or creates a copy of it. They look at my data after all. Shouldn't I know who is looking at my data, where exactly it is stored, how many copies exist and when it will be deleted? The relationship between a data-collecting website and its users is very asymmetric when it comes to data. Using the web as anonymously as possible is my only real defense against getting my data abused.

lemoncookiechip 5y ago

This just sounds ripe for abuse. Data mining, doxxing, swatting, more and more aggressive ads, identity theft and so on. Are people toxic on the internet (not just social media)? Yes. Does changing it so people have no protection or privacy change things? It instills fears in them, yes, but does it change human nature? No. The internet is just a reflection of what we are has a collective. You might not want to admit that we're twisted little things while also being altruistic and creative, but that's what we are, and saying mean things online shouldn't be punishable. Using this privacy to do other less savory things is a whole other issue, but they'll happen regardless and that's why we have people with the authority and tools to persecute those people. Also, I find it amusing that half the people defending this are also using online usernames with no photo or personal information directly attached to their account (maybe they have it somewhere or they'll give it to you if you ask nicely).

jcun4128 5y ago
> also using online usernames with no photo or personal information haha I feel the bias like when I get a downvote "what did I do wrong, conform". I'm not denying intelligence/facts and also I think it's "this is not Reddit" kind of thing.

throwawayapples 5y ago

For those of us who believe banning anonymity is an answer to anything, please ask yourself how you would feel if this site did that -- or even, in fact, if HN didn't actually make anon accounts (without even requiring an email confirmation) so easy that it's an incredibly common occurrence. 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?

TurkishPoptart 5y ago

Anonymity is more important that ever. I'm glad most of the things I've written online and on message boards were under total pseudonyms, because if those messages were retrieved 20-30 years later, I could be "canceled" for anything, depending the social mores of the time of retrieval.

gtvwill 5y ago

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.

anonypla 5y ago

BTW https://anonymousplanet.org https://anonymousplanet.org

mcguire 5y ago

Weirdly, I just submitted https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28946349 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28946349 earlier today: Evaluating the Effectiveness of Deplatforming as a Moderation Strategy on Twitter.

luxuryballs 5y ago

This is such a first world problem, when everything is going pretty well we must stop people from hating each other online!

dang 5y ago

Url changed from https://phys.org/news/2021-10-anonymous-social-media-accounts-online.html https://phys.org/news/2021-10-anonymous-social-media-account..., which points to this.

adminscoffee 5y ago

governments will ban anonymous accounts and the create fake people to push their own incentive