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The last week has taken me from “I believe in the freedom of online anonymity” to “Online anonymity possess a weight that a moral, civil society cannot bear.”

The last week has taken me from “I believe in the freedom of online anonymity” to “Online anonymity possess a weight that a moral, civil society cannot bear.” I do not believe humans are capable of responsibly wielding the power to anonymously connect with millions of people without the real weight of social consequence.

scandox 1y ago
I'm making 2 assumptions here: that you're American and that you're referring to the recent assassination. What I find odd is that American history is packed with assassinations and domestic terrorism and yet it is this recent event that has affected your thinking. In your own parlance, what gives?
m3047 1y ago
If the internet is in fact "the largest social media platform", then anonymity absolutely has to go as my public-facing telemetry server [0] based on DNS as a transport, and not rooted to the ICANN DNS tree, gets 1000+ abusive requests for every legitimate one. I'm supposed to return REFUSED to each and every one [1] of them (not drop them) and I'm not supposed to publish the IP addresses involved. Granted they could be spoofed, but the only way we'll ever know is to go ahead and publish so that a global picture can be developed and the owners of the addresses can tell us that they're being spoofed. [0] One of the pieces of telemetry is the addresses abusing the server. [1] I, and many other operators violate this stability requirement and drop traffic. [2] [2] There are no internet police. If there were then BCP 38 would be enforced and this particular problem would largely go away.
rkomorn 1y ago
They're unfortunately not much more capable of responsibly connecting with people non-anonymously, I'd say. See examples like finding someone's employer on LinkedIn to "out" the employee's objectionable behavior, doxxing, or to the extreme, SWATing, etc.
- qarl 1y ago
  Yeah. People use their real identities on Facebook, and it doesn't help a bit.
  - ks2048 1y ago
    > it doesn't help a bit. I would replace "it doesn't help a bit" with "it doesn't solve the problem". My casual browsing experience is that X is much more intense / extreme than Facebook. Of course, the bigger problem is the algorithm - if the extreme is always pushed to the top, then it doesn't matter if it's 1% or 0.001% - the a big enough pool, you only see extremes.
    - __MatrixMan__ 1y ago
      I bet if we didn't tolerate advertising and were instead optimising for what the user wanted we'd come up with something much more palatable.
      - rkomorn 1y ago
        A lot of this is driven by the user's behavior, not just advertising, though. "The algorithm" is going to give you more of what you engage with, and when it comes to sponsored content, it's going to give you the sponsored content you're most likely to engage with too. I'd argue that, while advertising has probably increased the number of people posting stuff online explicitly designed to try and generate revenue for themselves, that type of content's been around since much earlier. Heck, look at Reddit or 4chan: they're not sharing revenue with users and I'd say they're at least not without their own content problems. I'm not sure there's a convincing gap between what users "want" and what they actually engage with organically.
        __MatrixMan__ 1y ago
        Reddit and 4chan both get their money from advertisers though, so they have an incentive to try to boost engagement above whatever level might be natural for their userbase. Social interaction is integrated with our brain chemistry at a very fundamental level. It's a situation we've been adapting to for a million years. We have evolved systems for telling us when its time to disengage, and anybody who gets their revenue from advertising has an incentive to interfere with those systems. The downsides of social media: the radicalization, the disinformation, the echo chambers... These problems are ancient and humans are equipped to deal with them to a certain degree. What's insidious about ad-based social media is that the profit motive has driven the platforms to find ways to anesthetize the parts of us that would interfere with their business model, and it just so happens that those are the same parts that we've been relying on to address these evils back when "social media" was shouting into an intersection from a soap box.
tryauuum 1y ago
what happened?
jacobedawson 1y ago
The strongest counterpoint to that is the intense chilling effect that zero anonymity would have on political dissent and discourse that doesn't match the status quo or party line. I feel that would be much more dangerous for our society than occasionally suffering the consequence of some radicalized edge cases.
- slg 1y ago
  In that instance, the anonymity is treating the symptom and not the root cause of the problem you fear. The actual problem is a society that does not tolerate dissent.
  - NoahZuniga 1y ago
    You might live in an extremely free country and have no fear about political prosecution but still fear social prosecution. If someone I was friends with made racist remarks, they wouldn't be prosecuted for that. But I would stop being their friend. Similarly if I was the only one in my friend group against racism and advocate firefly against it, they would probably stop being my friends.
    - imtringued 1y ago
      Your case doesn't sound reasonable and it also doesn't fit the current zeitgeist. What people these days are worried about isn't that they are racist and have no outlets for their racism. It's that they worry that whatever they say will be reinterpreted as racism when they were making an honest attempt to not be racist.
      - NoahZuniga 1y ago
        > What people these days are worried about isn't that they are racist and have no outlets for their racism. It's that they worry that whatever they say will be reinterpreted as racism when they were making an honest attempt to not be racist. So you agree with my point that people could face social prosecution for dissenting (even when they are correct), so we should have anonymous platforms where they can champion their ideas. > Your case doesn't sound reasonable and it also doesn't fit the current zeitgeist. These were just extreme examples to indicate that there can be social repercussions to dissenting. Maybe a more convincing example is that if I advocate for making it easier to build housing because that will lower the cost of housing and many of my friends are homeowners, they might really not like me because lowering the cost of housing directly lowers their net worth.
XorNot 1y ago
What a bizarre conclusion given the multiple high profile individuals and politicians who overtly and directly called for violent oppression and civil war against their political enemies on the last week.
cramsession 1y ago
Why is that? Some irony as well that you're posting anonymously. Are you comfortable giving us your identification right now?
Longlius 1y ago
Anonymity has no real impact on this. People post heinous things under their full legal names just as readily. I'd argue if all it took was people saying some mean things anonymously to change your opinion, then your convictions weren't very strong to begin with.
- ks2048 1y ago
  > People post heinous things under their full legal names just as readily. I disagree with "just as readily" (i.e. most of the most heinous things are indeed bots or trolls). Also, I imagine that without the huge amount of bots and anonymous trolls, the real-name-accounts would not post as they do now - both because their opinions are shaped by the bots AND because the bots give them the sense that many more people agree with them.
- add-sub-mul-div 1y ago
  You're right. It's the weakest who are the most susceptible to demagoguery.
- numpad0 1y ago
  IMO it's a bit of mental gymnastics to think that anonymity has to do with this, when extremist narratives always come attached with a memorable full name and a face.
analognoise 1y ago
We don’t have a moral or civil society anyway; we can’t even prosecute Trumps numerous illegal actions (even when convicted!). Can’t get the Epstein files. Can’t even point out Charlie Kirk was not a great person (while politicians said nothing about the school shooting the same day), and where it’s legal to kill 40,000 of us a year due to poor medical coverage so we can prop up the stock. I’m not sure, given the moral dystopia we currently inhabit, what positive benefit would accrue from removing online anonymity?
boplicity 1y ago
Plenty of people are perfectly willing to be publicly despicable online in their social media accounts, using their real names. Pretty easy to find them. The problem is the leaders of the large social media organizations do not care about the consequences of their platforms enough to change how they operate. They're fine with hosting extremist and offensive content, and allowing extremists to build large followings using their platforms. Heck, they even encourage it!
sporkxrocket 1y ago
Are you talking about the Charlie Kirk thing? What does that have to do with online anonymity? They caught the shooter.
- moduspol 1y ago
  Also there is no shortage of people saying abhorrent things with their real names attached.
creata 1y ago
If you're talking about reactions to the murder of Charlie Kirk, I really don't think anonymity is the problem here, because the opinions I've seen people express anonymously aren't much different to the opinions I've seen people express with their names attached. If anything, the ones where people have attached their names tend to be a bit more extreme. Maybe attaching your name to something makes it feel more important to signal what group you're in.
- beeflet 1y ago
  Named users are not more brave than anonymous users, but they are more reckless
  - pitched 1y ago
    Anonymous users are much less likely to get defensive because they have nothing to defend.
    - userbinator 1y ago
      4chan seems to be a counterexample to that.
      - Thorrez 1y ago
        Are you saying 4chan users are defensive? They seem pretty unapologetically offensive to me.
tossaway0 1y ago
I don’t think it has much to do with being named. It’s the assumption that most people have that what they’re reading is being said by someone whose opinion they would actually value if they knew them. Disclosing names wouldn’t help. People actually knowing the person would help.
mythrwy 1y ago
Would you require identification to copy and tape up a bunch of fliers around town? Anonymity is necessary sometimes in my opinion.
__MatrixMan__ 1y ago
Really? With people being tracked down and fired for expressing their political views, it seems like online anonymity is more important than ever. Or better yet, we need some kind some zero knowledge doodad which enforces scarcity of anonymous handles such that a given voice is provably a member of your same congressional district, or state, or zip code, or whatever, and is known to not be spinning up new identities all willy nilly like, but can't be identified more precisely than that.
scottgg 1y ago
Moreover it’s not even possible for us to engage in _honest debate_ about the impact of social media anymore. Absolutist positions without nuance are the norm, and the folks who control these platforms control to a very large extent the narrative to push surrounding them, both directly through the platforms themselves and indirectly through lobbying and the obscene pool of capital they have siphoned off.
balamatom 1y ago
Nice bloody try, guv, I mean "blitz_skull". Tell me now will ya, who will effect "the real weight of social consequence" over anonymous 1-to-1M connections, other than other humans, the same kind that by your premise are not "capable of responsibly wielding [...] power" over such things? (Or are there multiple kinds? Eh?) Would "the real weight of social consequence" work the way you want it to when embodied by a commission? When codified by law? In the form a bot? As crowd? A corp? Me? Nah, you of course. It's ever telling how the legitimacy of millions of strangers being able to decide the fate of any one individual is hardly ever called into question - only ever the ability of one to talk back.
ACCount37 1y ago
And this is how we get things like TSA and Patriot Act. "I was totally in favor of freedom, until one bad thing happened, and now I think freedom should never have existed in the first place!"
- neuronic 1y ago
  I tend to agree, especially because the most harming political influencers are NOT (pseudo-)anonymous. But... it's not just a "bad thing" that is happening. It is the foundational destruction of free societies as we know them. Debates and democratic discourse are replaced with hate, oppression and violence. I believe that social dynamics like shame and consequences are disabled by pseudo-anonymzation. Pretty much the same effect as people becoming more aggressive and vocal in the confines of their cars. You'd never flip off random people in a supermarket as some would do for getting cut off in traffic. This substack posts a few interesting theories and ideas how that comes to be. However, the most concerning to me is the asymmetric impact of emotional manipulation due to social media enabled network dynamics. In particular: > Online discussions are dominated by a surprisingly small, extremely vocal, and non-representative minority. Research on social media has found that, while only 3% of active accounts are toxic, they produce 33% of all content. Furthermore, 74% of all online conflicts are started in just 1% of communities, and 0.1% of users shared 80% of fake news. Not only does this extreme minority stir discontent, spread misinformation, and spark outrage online, they also bias the meta-perceptions of most users who passively “lurk” online. The brain responds to alarmist, negative and distressing information with much higher priority. At the same time, very few radical and extreme influencers can utilize this mechanism, amplified by social media trying to boost ad revenue. Counterfactual information which directly appeals to the biases and psychology of users is posted and wrapped into click-baity designs to maximize attention and revenue. Tribes are forming and very few elite users can steer the information consumption of users - not just what but also how. This is highly damaging to society and there is no more institutional trust anywhere to retrieve reliable information on which discussions can be based. Everyone selectively chooses their "reliable sources". This is the absolute opposite of how PKI works, it's like everyone just picks the Root Certs they like (for us techies). This is of course ironic because all studies and knowledge humanity has to offer are a single search prompt away. But it simply doesn't matter if institutional trust is gone and studies are dismissed because they are coming from "woke" or "radical right wing" sources - completely obliterating what we are trying to achieve with peer review and so on.
padjo 1y ago
No offence but if you’re swing between two poles like this in such a short time you probably haven’t considered the topic deeply enough and for long enough. Anonymity can be very powerful for marginalised groups and it can be abused by trolls. Its value is contextual and not some simple good/bad dichotomy. Successfully integrating technology into society is, like most political topics, complicated, requires a nuanced understanding of issues and a willingness to find compromise and less than perfect solutions. Sadly the political system (and the side in power now particularly) is increasingly offering moral absolutes and simplifications.

scandox 1y ago

I'm making 2 assumptions here: that you're American and that you're referring to the recent assassination. What I find odd is that American history is packed with assassinations and domestic terrorism and yet it is this recent event that has affected your thinking. In your own parlance, what gives?

m3047 1y ago

If the internet is in fact "the largest social media platform", then anonymity absolutely has to go as my public-facing telemetry server [0] based on DNS as a transport, and not rooted to the ICANN DNS tree, gets 1000+ abusive requests for every legitimate one. I'm supposed to return REFUSED to each and every one [1] of them (not drop them) and I'm not supposed to publish the IP addresses involved. Granted they could be spoofed, but the only way we'll ever know is to go ahead and publish so that a global picture can be developed and the owners of the addresses can tell us that they're being spoofed. [0] One of the pieces of telemetry is the addresses abusing the server. [1] I, and many other operators violate this stability requirement and drop traffic. [2] [2] There are no internet police. If there were then BCP 38 would be enforced and this particular problem would largely go away.

rkomorn 1y ago

They're unfortunately not much more capable of responsibly connecting with people non-anonymously, I'd say. See examples like finding someone's employer on LinkedIn to "out" the employee's objectionable behavior, doxxing, or to the extreme, SWATing, etc.

qarl 1y ago
Yeah. People use their real identities on Facebook, and it doesn't help a bit.
- ks2048 1y ago
  > it doesn't help a bit. I would replace "it doesn't help a bit" with "it doesn't solve the problem". My casual browsing experience is that X is much more intense / extreme than Facebook. Of course, the bigger problem is the algorithm - if the extreme is always pushed to the top, then it doesn't matter if it's 1% or 0.001% - the a big enough pool, you only see extremes.
  - __MatrixMan__ 1y ago
    I bet if we didn't tolerate advertising and were instead optimising for what the user wanted we'd come up with something much more palatable.
    - rkomorn 1y ago
      A lot of this is driven by the user's behavior, not just advertising, though. "The algorithm" is going to give you more of what you engage with, and when it comes to sponsored content, it's going to give you the sponsored content you're most likely to engage with too. I'd argue that, while advertising has probably increased the number of people posting stuff online explicitly designed to try and generate revenue for themselves, that type of content's been around since much earlier. Heck, look at Reddit or 4chan: they're not sharing revenue with users and I'd say they're at least not without their own content problems. I'm not sure there's a convincing gap between what users "want" and what they actually engage with organically.
      - __MatrixMan__ 1y ago
        Reddit and 4chan both get their money from advertisers though, so they have an incentive to try to boost engagement above whatever level might be natural for their userbase. Social interaction is integrated with our brain chemistry at a very fundamental level. It's a situation we've been adapting to for a million years. We have evolved systems for telling us when its time to disengage, and anybody who gets their revenue from advertising has an incentive to interfere with those systems. The downsides of social media: the radicalization, the disinformation, the echo chambers... These problems are ancient and humans are equipped to deal with them to a certain degree. What's insidious about ad-based social media is that the profit motive has driven the platforms to find ways to anesthetize the parts of us that would interfere with their business model, and it just so happens that those are the same parts that we've been relying on to address these evils back when "social media" was shouting into an intersection from a soap box.

tryauuum 1y ago

what happened?

jacobedawson 1y ago

The strongest counterpoint to that is the intense chilling effect that zero anonymity would have on political dissent and discourse that doesn't match the status quo or party line. I feel that would be much more dangerous for our society than occasionally suffering the consequence of some radicalized edge cases.

slg 1y ago
In that instance, the anonymity is treating the symptom and not the root cause of the problem you fear. The actual problem is a society that does not tolerate dissent.
- NoahZuniga 1y ago
  You might live in an extremely free country and have no fear about political prosecution but still fear social prosecution. If someone I was friends with made racist remarks, they wouldn't be prosecuted for that. But I would stop being their friend. Similarly if I was the only one in my friend group against racism and advocate firefly against it, they would probably stop being my friends.
  - imtringued 1y ago
    Your case doesn't sound reasonable and it also doesn't fit the current zeitgeist. What people these days are worried about isn't that they are racist and have no outlets for their racism. It's that they worry that whatever they say will be reinterpreted as racism when they were making an honest attempt to not be racist.
    - NoahZuniga 1y ago
      > What people these days are worried about isn't that they are racist and have no outlets for their racism. It's that they worry that whatever they say will be reinterpreted as racism when they were making an honest attempt to not be racist. So you agree with my point that people could face social prosecution for dissenting (even when they are correct), so we should have anonymous platforms where they can champion their ideas. > Your case doesn't sound reasonable and it also doesn't fit the current zeitgeist. These were just extreme examples to indicate that there can be social repercussions to dissenting. Maybe a more convincing example is that if I advocate for making it easier to build housing because that will lower the cost of housing and many of my friends are homeowners, they might really not like me because lowering the cost of housing directly lowers their net worth.

XorNot 1y ago

What a bizarre conclusion given the multiple high profile individuals and politicians who overtly and directly called for violent oppression and civil war against their political enemies on the last week.

cramsession 1y ago

Why is that? Some irony as well that you're posting anonymously. Are you comfortable giving us your identification right now?

Longlius 1y ago

Anonymity has no real impact on this. People post heinous things under their full legal names just as readily. I'd argue if all it took was people saying some mean things anonymously to change your opinion, then your convictions weren't very strong to begin with.

ks2048 1y ago
> People post heinous things under their full legal names just as readily. I disagree with "just as readily" (i.e. most of the most heinous things are indeed bots or trolls). Also, I imagine that without the huge amount of bots and anonymous trolls, the real-name-accounts would not post as they do now - both because their opinions are shaped by the bots AND because the bots give them the sense that many more people agree with them.
add-sub-mul-div 1y ago
You're right. It's the weakest who are the most susceptible to demagoguery.
numpad0 1y ago
IMO it's a bit of mental gymnastics to think that anonymity has to do with this, when extremist narratives always come attached with a memorable full name and a face.

analognoise 1y ago

We don’t have a moral or civil society anyway; we can’t even prosecute Trumps numerous illegal actions (even when convicted!). Can’t get the Epstein files. Can’t even point out Charlie Kirk was not a great person (while politicians said nothing about the school shooting the same day), and where it’s legal to kill 40,000 of us a year due to poor medical coverage so we can prop up the stock. I’m not sure, given the moral dystopia we currently inhabit, what positive benefit would accrue from removing online anonymity?

boplicity 1y ago

Plenty of people are perfectly willing to be publicly despicable online in their social media accounts, using their real names. Pretty easy to find them. The problem is the leaders of the large social media organizations do not care about the consequences of their platforms enough to change how they operate. They're fine with hosting extremist and offensive content, and allowing extremists to build large followings using their platforms. Heck, they even encourage it!

sporkxrocket 1y ago

Are you talking about the Charlie Kirk thing? What does that have to do with online anonymity? They caught the shooter.

moduspol 1y ago
Also there is no shortage of people saying abhorrent things with their real names attached.

creata 1y ago

If you're talking about reactions to the murder of Charlie Kirk, I really don't think anonymity is the problem here, because the opinions I've seen people express anonymously aren't much different to the opinions I've seen people express with their names attached. If anything, the ones where people have attached their names tend to be a bit more extreme. Maybe attaching your name to something makes it feel more important to signal what group you're in.

beeflet 1y ago
Named users are not more brave than anonymous users, but they are more reckless
- pitched 1y ago
  Anonymous users are much less likely to get defensive because they have nothing to defend.
  - userbinator 1y ago
    4chan seems to be a counterexample to that.
    - Thorrez 1y ago
      Are you saying 4chan users are defensive? They seem pretty unapologetically offensive to me.

tossaway0 1y ago

I don’t think it has much to do with being named. It’s the assumption that most people have that what they’re reading is being said by someone whose opinion they would actually value if they knew them. Disclosing names wouldn’t help. People actually knowing the person would help.

mythrwy 1y ago

Would you require identification to copy and tape up a bunch of fliers around town? Anonymity is necessary sometimes in my opinion.

__MatrixMan__ 1y ago

Really? With people being tracked down and fired for expressing their political views, it seems like online anonymity is more important than ever. Or better yet, we need some kind some zero knowledge doodad which enforces scarcity of anonymous handles such that a given voice is provably a member of your same congressional district, or state, or zip code, or whatever, and is known to not be spinning up new identities all willy nilly like, but can't be identified more precisely than that.

scottgg 1y ago

Moreover it’s not even possible for us to engage in _honest debate_ about the impact of social media anymore. Absolutist positions without nuance are the norm, and the folks who control these platforms control to a very large extent the narrative to push surrounding them, both directly through the platforms themselves and indirectly through lobbying and the obscene pool of capital they have siphoned off.

balamatom 1y ago

Nice bloody try, guv, I mean "blitz_skull". Tell me now will ya, who will effect "the real weight of social consequence" over anonymous 1-to-1M connections, other than other humans, the same kind that by your premise are not "capable of responsibly wielding [...] power" over such things? (Or are there multiple kinds? Eh?) Would "the real weight of social consequence" work the way you want it to when embodied by a commission? When codified by law? In the form a bot? As crowd? A corp? Me? Nah, you of course. It's ever telling how the legitimacy of millions of strangers being able to decide the fate of any one individual is hardly ever called into question - only ever the ability of one to talk back.

ACCount37 1y ago

And this is how we get things like TSA and Patriot Act. "I was totally in favor of freedom, until one bad thing happened, and now I think freedom should never have existed in the first place!"

neuronic 1y ago
I tend to agree, especially because the most harming political influencers are NOT (pseudo-)anonymous. But... it's not just a "bad thing" that is happening. It is the foundational destruction of free societies as we know them. Debates and democratic discourse are replaced with hate, oppression and violence. I believe that social dynamics like shame and consequences are disabled by pseudo-anonymzation. Pretty much the same effect as people becoming more aggressive and vocal in the confines of their cars. You'd never flip off random people in a supermarket as some would do for getting cut off in traffic. This substack posts a few interesting theories and ideas how that comes to be. However, the most concerning to me is the asymmetric impact of emotional manipulation due to social media enabled network dynamics. In particular: > Online discussions are dominated by a surprisingly small, extremely vocal, and non-representative minority. Research on social media has found that, while only 3% of active accounts are toxic, they produce 33% of all content. Furthermore, 74% of all online conflicts are started in just 1% of communities, and 0.1% of users shared 80% of fake news. Not only does this extreme minority stir discontent, spread misinformation, and spark outrage online, they also bias the meta-perceptions of most users who passively “lurk” online. The brain responds to alarmist, negative and distressing information with much higher priority. At the same time, very few radical and extreme influencers can utilize this mechanism, amplified by social media trying to boost ad revenue. Counterfactual information which directly appeals to the biases and psychology of users is posted and wrapped into click-baity designs to maximize attention and revenue. Tribes are forming and very few elite users can steer the information consumption of users - not just what but also how. This is highly damaging to society and there is no more institutional trust anywhere to retrieve reliable information on which discussions can be based. Everyone selectively chooses their "reliable sources". This is the absolute opposite of how PKI works, it's like everyone just picks the Root Certs they like (for us techies). This is of course ironic because all studies and knowledge humanity has to offer are a single search prompt away. But it simply doesn't matter if institutional trust is gone and studies are dismissed because they are coming from "woke" or "radical right wing" sources - completely obliterating what we are trying to achieve with peer review and so on.

padjo 1y ago

No offence but if you’re swing between two poles like this in such a short time you probably haven’t considered the topic deeply enough and for long enough. Anonymity can be very powerful for marginalised groups and it can be abused by trolls. Its value is contextual and not some simple good/bad dichotomy. Successfully integrating technology into society is, like most political topics, complicated, requires a nuanced understanding of issues and a willingness to find compromise and less than perfect solutions. Sadly the political system (and the side in power now particularly) is increasingly offering moral absolutes and simplifications.