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These are called “chilling effects,” they cause people to self censor when it comes to socially controversial positions. Historically, this would include womens

These are called “chilling effects,” they cause people to self censor when it comes to socially controversial positions. Historically, this would include womens suffrage, black rights, gay rights, various religious positions… It’s not okay to be tracked so thoroughly that people stop feeling they can explore controversy online

dcow 4y ago
On top of that: anonymity should not be required to explore controversy at all. That’s the chilling effect. The issue is that as a society we have failed royally to internalize tolerating freedom of expression. Instead we choose to censor and silence people who wish to explore controversy even though we have laws in place that protect one’s freedom to express themselves however they desire without damaging recourse to their life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. Anonymity is certainly a tool that can be used in dire situations when there are real credible threats and the stakes are high. However it takes a certain type of courage to express oneself freely which would be really nice to see in the majority of all other situations. Instead of exploring controversy anonymously, we should aim as a society to explore it normally and simply build up the intellectual maturity and capacity to tolerate controversy like adults and not children…
- dcow 4y ago
  In short, I don't want to live in a society where everyone is anonymous. That doesn't sound very social at all and doesn't work at scale. I want to live in a society where I can build strong respectful adult relationships with people and not immediately judge, shun, and twitter mob someone who says they don't 100% agree with my lifestyle. Tolerating differences in viewpoints and lifestyles is true diversity. Diversity is not finding people with different physical features who all actually think the same and putting them on a magazine cover or in the same office together.
  - aaaaaaaaata 4y ago
    > In short, I don't want to live in a society where everyone is anonymous. You wear a name tag to the pub, or supermarket?
    - eurasiantiger 4y ago
      You don’t keep your phone with you?
      - m-p-3 4y ago
        Or always pay cash?
        eurasiantiger 4y ago
        That doesn’t help if every other phone in the vicinity of the business gets a ping from your phone.
    - throwthroyaboat 4y ago
      Being gratuitously anti-social in a pub or supermarket already has consequences, name tags or not (you'll get kicked out). It doesn't matter if people know your name or not, they'll recognize your face, and you might not be welcome back. Being gratuitously anti-social online might also have consequences (your account gets banned), but if creating another anonymous account is free and easy, then the consequences are trivially ignored. You could make a distinction between anonymity and ease-of-creating-new-accounts, but usually the two are tied together.
    - RandomBK 4y ago
      No, but I also don't wear a mask that covers my face and I don't use a voice changer to scramble my speech. In meatspace, people use different modes of identification than just a name, so names aren't as important to figuring out who's who.
    - riffic 4y ago
      the cameras that track your every movement inside a supermarket (plus the software that labels your image with a unique identifier) have you pinned down pretty well already, no need for nametags.
  - nicwolff 4y ago
    I wonder which elements of your "lifestyle" would get you shunned, or disinherited, or imprisoned, or killed for your family's honor. I enjoy almost perfect intersectional privilege, and one of those privileges has been to use my full real Googlable name on all my social media accounts, specifically because I want to be accountable for what I say, and because I've always believed that nothing about my real identity imperils me. (I'm a little less sure, recently, that liberal atheists and our allies will be safe from the American pogroms to come. Too late now!)
  - denkmoon 4y ago
    I don't want to live in a society where exploration and discussion of taboo ideas risks my livelihood. Short of somehow inducing massive change in the way most people think about things, anonymity is the only way to achieve that.
hgomersall 4y ago
I don't feel I have any difficulty airing positions I feel online without anonymity. I sometimes end up arguing, but rarely in bad faith. I stand by what I say, though my views now may be different to those of previous me and I'm happy to debate that too. If you can't stand by a position, maybe you shouldn't air it.
- shkkmo 4y ago
  It isn't about not standing by a position, it is about the potential of attracting the attention of a small extremist minority that will spend outsize effort trying to destroy your life. I'm glad that you feel secure enough in your position in life that you think you can weather such an attack, but not everyone is so lucky. Implying anyone who needs anonymity is simply holding an unreasonable position is simply not fair.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
    > Implying anyone who needs anonymity is simply holding an unreasonable position is simply not fair. Neither of us did.
    - danachow 4y ago
      From the GP: > If you can't stand by a position, maybe you shouldn't air it. The implication of this is pretty clear.
      - ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
        Fair point. But context is king. The context of that particular quote, is that it came immediately after this: > I stand by what I say, though my views now may be different to those of previous me and I'm happy to debate that too. They were clearly talking about themselves, and a rule they apply to themselves. That said, one of my "cleanup routines" for writing and posting, is I look for instances of "you," and often change it to "I" or "me." I would have probably written it like so: > If I can't stand by a position, maybe I shouldn't air it. BTW: I apply the same philosophy to my own posting. There's a very valid argument for online (and offline) anonymity, and I don't like the specious "If you aren't doing anything wrong, then you shouldn't have anything to hide." argument. I just find using that as a fig leaf for trolling and stalking people is rather annoying, as that behavior actually puts the people that really need it, at risk. Standing up for my Principles can sometimes be quite scary. I've risked losing jobs, for refusing to carry out orders that were unethical, and I am routinely attacked, here (but politely -this is HN, after all), for holding some of the views I hold.
heavyset_go 4y ago
To give an example of this, I lived in a municipality where most community-driven things were organized on Facebook, including government-driven initiatives. I won't participate in them using my real name, because I once witnessed the mayor of the town doxx and lead a campaign to harass a single mother because she disagreed with the majority party that's run the town for the last 40 years. She got dogpiled on by hundreds of residents for participating in a discussion on Facebook. It wasn't an isolated incident either, other people have had the same experience and even felt the need to move after it happened because some people took it to an extreme and felt the need to harass them for months afterwards.
- eurasiantiger 4y ago
  You don’t have laws against that sort of abuse of power?
  - nerdponx 4y ago
    Laws only work when law enforcement and criminal justice cares to enforce them and/or when the wronged party has enough resources to sue in a venue where law enforcement and criminal justice will care.
  - heavyset_go 4y ago
    Maybe, but the entire county is run by the good ol' boys network. Good luck getting the police to investigate or charge the mayor, and good luck in court. Part of the chilling effect is the incentive against pursuing justice in cases like this. The single mother was already publicly targeted and made unsafe, chances are that the public targeting will get even worse if she pursued justice against her harassers. These same people in power who led this campaign against her have sycophants in the local media who have no problem using their wide reach to smear dissenters like they do every election season, even for minor Board of Ed elections.
  - m-p-3 4y ago
    Laws are nice on paper, but only if someone actually enforces them.
kyllo 4y ago
Chilling effects are not unequivocally bad though. When the speech in question is advocating for stripping away the civil rights of or committing genocidal acts against certain groups of people, I'd much rather that speech be chilled.
dbtc 4y ago
On the other hand, absolute freedom (and convenience) of expression for each of our disembodied and anonymized selves is problematic in the opposite way. To bypass the sources of those chilling effects by remaining anonymous may in fact only allow them to grow stronger.

dcow 4y ago

On top of that: anonymity should not be required to explore controversy at all. That’s the chilling effect. The issue is that as a society we have failed royally to internalize tolerating freedom of expression. Instead we choose to censor and silence people who wish to explore controversy even though we have laws in place that protect one’s freedom to express themselves however they desire without damaging recourse to their life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. Anonymity is certainly a tool that can be used in dire situations when there are real credible threats and the stakes are high. However it takes a certain type of courage to express oneself freely which would be really nice to see in the majority of all other situations. Instead of exploring controversy anonymously, we should aim as a society to explore it normally and simply build up the intellectual maturity and capacity to tolerate controversy like adults and not children…

dcow 4y ago
In short, I don't want to live in a society where everyone is anonymous. That doesn't sound very social at all and doesn't work at scale. I want to live in a society where I can build strong respectful adult relationships with people and not immediately judge, shun, and twitter mob someone who says they don't 100% agree with my lifestyle. Tolerating differences in viewpoints and lifestyles is true diversity. Diversity is not finding people with different physical features who all actually think the same and putting them on a magazine cover or in the same office together.
- aaaaaaaaata 4y ago
  > In short, I don't want to live in a society where everyone is anonymous. You wear a name tag to the pub, or supermarket?
  - eurasiantiger 4y ago
    You don’t keep your phone with you?
    - m-p-3 4y ago
      Or always pay cash?
      - eurasiantiger 4y ago
        That doesn’t help if every other phone in the vicinity of the business gets a ping from your phone.
  - throwthroyaboat 4y ago
    Being gratuitously anti-social in a pub or supermarket already has consequences, name tags or not (you'll get kicked out). It doesn't matter if people know your name or not, they'll recognize your face, and you might not be welcome back. Being gratuitously anti-social online might also have consequences (your account gets banned), but if creating another anonymous account is free and easy, then the consequences are trivially ignored. You could make a distinction between anonymity and ease-of-creating-new-accounts, but usually the two are tied together.
  - RandomBK 4y ago
    No, but I also don't wear a mask that covers my face and I don't use a voice changer to scramble my speech. In meatspace, people use different modes of identification than just a name, so names aren't as important to figuring out who's who.
  - riffic 4y ago
    the cameras that track your every movement inside a supermarket (plus the software that labels your image with a unique identifier) have you pinned down pretty well already, no need for nametags.
- nicwolff 4y ago
  I wonder which elements of your "lifestyle" would get you shunned, or disinherited, or imprisoned, or killed for your family's honor. I enjoy almost perfect intersectional privilege, and one of those privileges has been to use my full real Googlable name on all my social media accounts, specifically because I want to be accountable for what I say, and because I've always believed that nothing about my real identity imperils me. (I'm a little less sure, recently, that liberal atheists and our allies will be safe from the American pogroms to come. Too late now!)
- denkmoon 4y ago
  I don't want to live in a society where exploration and discussion of taboo ideas risks my livelihood. Short of somehow inducing massive change in the way most people think about things, anonymity is the only way to achieve that.

hgomersall 4y ago

I don't feel I have any difficulty airing positions I feel online without anonymity. I sometimes end up arguing, but rarely in bad faith. I stand by what I say, though my views now may be different to those of previous me and I'm happy to debate that too. If you can't stand by a position, maybe you shouldn't air it.

shkkmo 4y ago
It isn't about not standing by a position, it is about the potential of attracting the attention of a small extremist minority that will spend outsize effort trying to destroy your life. I'm glad that you feel secure enough in your position in life that you think you can weather such an attack, but not everyone is so lucky. Implying anyone who needs anonymity is simply holding an unreasonable position is simply not fair.
- ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
  > Implying anyone who needs anonymity is simply holding an unreasonable position is simply not fair. Neither of us did.
  - danachow 4y ago
    From the GP: > If you can't stand by a position, maybe you shouldn't air it. The implication of this is pretty clear.
    - ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
      Fair point. But context is king. The context of that particular quote, is that it came immediately after this: > I stand by what I say, though my views now may be different to those of previous me and I'm happy to debate that too. They were clearly talking about themselves, and a rule they apply to themselves. That said, one of my "cleanup routines" for writing and posting, is I look for instances of "you," and often change it to "I" or "me." I would have probably written it like so: > If I can't stand by a position, maybe I shouldn't air it. BTW: I apply the same philosophy to my own posting. There's a very valid argument for online (and offline) anonymity, and I don't like the specious "If you aren't doing anything wrong, then you shouldn't have anything to hide." argument. I just find using that as a fig leaf for trolling and stalking people is rather annoying, as that behavior actually puts the people that really need it, at risk. Standing up for my Principles can sometimes be quite scary. I've risked losing jobs, for refusing to carry out orders that were unethical, and I am routinely attacked, here (but politely -this is HN, after all), for holding some of the views I hold.

heavyset_go 4y ago

To give an example of this, I lived in a municipality where most community-driven things were organized on Facebook, including government-driven initiatives. I won't participate in them using my real name, because I once witnessed the mayor of the town doxx and lead a campaign to harass a single mother because she disagreed with the majority party that's run the town for the last 40 years. She got dogpiled on by hundreds of residents for participating in a discussion on Facebook. It wasn't an isolated incident either, other people have had the same experience and even felt the need to move after it happened because some people took it to an extreme and felt the need to harass them for months afterwards.

eurasiantiger 4y ago
You don’t have laws against that sort of abuse of power?
- nerdponx 4y ago
  Laws only work when law enforcement and criminal justice cares to enforce them and/or when the wronged party has enough resources to sue in a venue where law enforcement and criminal justice will care.
- heavyset_go 4y ago
  Maybe, but the entire county is run by the good ol' boys network. Good luck getting the police to investigate or charge the mayor, and good luck in court. Part of the chilling effect is the incentive against pursuing justice in cases like this. The single mother was already publicly targeted and made unsafe, chances are that the public targeting will get even worse if she pursued justice against her harassers. These same people in power who led this campaign against her have sycophants in the local media who have no problem using their wide reach to smear dissenters like they do every election season, even for minor Board of Ed elections.
- m-p-3 4y ago
  Laws are nice on paper, but only if someone actually enforces them.

kyllo 4y ago

Chilling effects are not unequivocally bad though. When the speech in question is advocating for stripping away the civil rights of or committing genocidal acts against certain groups of people, I'd much rather that speech be chilled.

dbtc 4y ago

On the other hand, absolute freedom (and convenience) of expression for each of our disembodied and anonymized selves is problematic in the opposite way. To bypass the sources of those chilling effects by remaining anonymous may in fact only allow them to grow stronger.