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I think anonymous accounts should be expensive (in terms of time) to set up. Anonymity and pseudonyms are important for those who need to whistleblow or are fro

I think anonymous accounts should be expensive (in terms of time) to set up. Anonymity and pseudonyms are important for those who need to whistleblow or are from oppressed groups so the possibility absolutely needs to be preserved. But what isn't needed is cheap throwaway accounts that can be used for abuse and then discarded as soon as they are banned. If to sign up anonymously you had to do something, a quiz or play through a game that took about 30 minutes then that would reduce the rate of account creation for abuse. If you were prepared to give a real phone number (and use it for verification) then you could bypass the task and get an instant account but obviously any ban would apply to the phone number not just that particular account.

tomp 12y ago
Like the governments that promoting security and safety at the expense of privacy and freedom, Twitter has a too bad a record of dealing with internal abuse to be trusted. For example, there were stories about them stealing usernames from people (because a celebrity showed up). Similarly, any kind of process they set up for dealing with external abuse can be abused; people will be flagging accounts they disagree with, hoping they would be banned, and other people would DDOS the system by flagging too many accounts, making it impossible for Twitter to keep up with it. The solution is simple: set up a new service, see if users use it.
newhouseb 12y ago
Exactly this, and what's so mind boggling is that this is not a new problem by any means. I'm sure that among twitter's worries is how to effectively scale an abuse prevention operation, but there are some pretty easy automatic filters that would go a long way. A few that come to mind (provided accounts are tied to phone numbers): 1) A block that prevents the harasser from even @mentioning the harassee in any way. 2) Automatic disabling of accounts that are blocked by more than two users whom the harasser explicitly @mentioned 3) A "dog house" mode which automatically disables distribution of a user's tweets who have been reported as harassment without explicitly telling them, leaving them to harass nothingness until they get bored and leave.
- josephlord 12y ago
  Number 2 could probably be abused. Get several people to respond to somebody and when they reply block them. Number 3 needs to be applied carefully as wrongfully banned people (it does happen) will be harmed.
  - newhouseb 12y ago
    (replying to both since they're effectively the same comment) Abuse of such things is definitely a challenge, and there is finesse on choosing the right thresholds. I doubt twitter can fully escape manual moderation and as such one of the goals of a system like this would simply be to reduce the number of situations that require human intervention. Undoubtedly, there will be false positives, but abuse of the abuse system will likely be rarer than abuse as a whole and if a human moderates and finds such meta-abuse it would be grounds for the strictest means of blocking twitter can provide, thereby hopefully incentivizing against it.
- pgeorgi 12y ago
  Blocking is an issue, since that can be weaponized way too easily: "I don't like your non-harrassing opinion, so I'll get two buddies to engage with you, then block you once you respond." The "dog house" could even work for cliques: If a certain number or percentage of your peers (as determined by follow relationships and metions) block a user (for themselves), the platform could make them disappear for you as well (unless you engage with them first). That should be good enough to keep adverse groups separated while avoiding the issue of "I'm not abusing them, I'm calling them out" that's already mentioned elsewhere.
- prawn 12y ago
  What if a user could toggle a setting through which users of a certain type couldn't @reply them at all? e.g., accounts created within the last month, or accounts with fewer than 50 tweets, etc.
- A_COMPUTER 12y ago
  1) kind of already happens, they can mention but it's not linked, which is laughably enough to prevent a significant degree of mobbing by their own followers. 2) Someone in the atheist-skeptic community made a tool called the blockbot that ostensibly was to automatically block people from a list that you never want to talk to in the first place because the blockbot operator already identified them as trolls. Unfortunately the main reason was that the developer figured out that mass blocks caused an automated response mechanism to suspend that users. It was really an offensive, not defensive mechanism. This has been somewhat changed, but the reason I bring it up is that this has been tried by Twitter and unscrupulous people used it as an attack tool. 3) is similar to 2) but I suspect they are already doing this in some cases.
andreasvc 12y ago
I don't think anonymity is the real issue, although it makes trolling easier. Services such as Facebook and Youtube require real names, yet they still have lots of people trolling each other. I think it is rather the feeling of being able to get away with it which causes people to have an illusion of anonymity, whether or not there name/phone number is actually associated with their account. I'm curious if it isn't feasible to do traffic analysis and nip trollers in the bud when it turns out that one or more twitterers are sending a large number of tweets to a single person without an actual conversation taking place.
- masklinn 12y ago
  > I don't think anonymity is the real issue, although it makes trolling easier. Anonymity isn't the real issue (though it's a compounding factor), the issue is how easy throwaway accounts are to create: for victims of abuse, it's not possible to "manage" abuse by blocking abuser accounts because within seconds they can be on a new yet-to-be-blocked account. In fact, I'd expect most serial abusers don't even bother waiting, they create an account, throw a salvo of abuse, create a new account, new salvo, and the account creation can be trivially automated. If accounts are either cheap and unique (based on "real-world" identity) or relatively expensive (time-wise) but anonymous, the ability to block people becomes far more useful for the serially abused.
DanBC 12y ago
There are plenty of people who are fine being vile human beings on their normal accounts under their real names. http://www.salon.com/2014/12/10/whats_up_with_the_rag_head_when_i_starred_in_a_facebook_ad/ http://www.salon.com/2014/12/10/whats_up_with_the_rag_head_w... > “What terrorist group does this guy belong too?” > “this is horrible, Facebook should be promoted by a different person, i have lost a lot of respect for Facebook because of there choice to use this person.” > “Can I borrow your towel on your head I ran out of toilet paper please sir?” > “What’s up with the rag head?” > “Get that Isis terrorist off of your ad” > “Get this camel jockey off my news feed pronto!”
- josephlord 12y ago
  And they can be banned with a real cost to the owner. The decision about whether or not particular things cross the ban line is separate from the design of a system that imposes a real impact when the ban occurs. Also in the context of harassment they can be blocked by the person being harassed
prawn 12y ago
Definitely worth considering but any significant impedance to joining the network would have a financial cost for Twitter in terms of adoption, and would never get up.
dexen 12y ago
Teamspeak v3† solves this in an interesting way: the program supports creation of anonymous (or rather, pseudonymous) identities easily, each associated with an unique ID which takes adjustable amount of time to compute on users' computers. The adjustable parameter, called "Security Level", is expressed as a small integer. To protect from flood of new (spam) identities, channel owners / operators can select minimum difficulty allowed on the channel. The higher the Security Level required, the more time it takes to create such identity. Values around 24 represent a dozen seconds worth of computation, while around 28 is a few minutes.‡ This easily discourages casual spammers, while legit users have no problem with spending a few dozen seconds, or a few minutes to create an identity. † VoIP team chat, used by gamers. ‡ more information: http://forum.teamspeak.com/showthread.php/47502-Security-level-huh http://forum.teamspeak.com/showthread.php/47502-Security-lev...

tomp 12y ago

Like the governments that promoting security and safety at the expense of privacy and freedom, Twitter has a too bad a record of dealing with internal abuse to be trusted. For example, there were stories about them stealing usernames from people (because a celebrity showed up). Similarly, any kind of process they set up for dealing with external abuse can be abused; people will be flagging accounts they disagree with, hoping they would be banned, and other people would DDOS the system by flagging too many accounts, making it impossible for Twitter to keep up with it. The solution is simple: set up a new service, see if users use it.

newhouseb 12y ago

Exactly this, and what's so mind boggling is that this is not a new problem by any means. I'm sure that among twitter's worries is how to effectively scale an abuse prevention operation, but there are some pretty easy automatic filters that would go a long way. A few that come to mind (provided accounts are tied to phone numbers): 1) A block that prevents the harasser from even @mentioning the harassee in any way. 2) Automatic disabling of accounts that are blocked by more than two users whom the harasser explicitly @mentioned 3) A "dog house" mode which automatically disables distribution of a user's tweets who have been reported as harassment without explicitly telling them, leaving them to harass nothingness until they get bored and leave.

josephlord 12y ago
Number 2 could probably be abused. Get several people to respond to somebody and when they reply block them. Number 3 needs to be applied carefully as wrongfully banned people (it does happen) will be harmed.
- newhouseb 12y ago
  (replying to both since they're effectively the same comment) Abuse of such things is definitely a challenge, and there is finesse on choosing the right thresholds. I doubt twitter can fully escape manual moderation and as such one of the goals of a system like this would simply be to reduce the number of situations that require human intervention. Undoubtedly, there will be false positives, but abuse of the abuse system will likely be rarer than abuse as a whole and if a human moderates and finds such meta-abuse it would be grounds for the strictest means of blocking twitter can provide, thereby hopefully incentivizing against it.
pgeorgi 12y ago
Blocking is an issue, since that can be weaponized way too easily: "I don't like your non-harrassing opinion, so I'll get two buddies to engage with you, then block you once you respond." The "dog house" could even work for cliques: If a certain number or percentage of your peers (as determined by follow relationships and metions) block a user (for themselves), the platform could make them disappear for you as well (unless you engage with them first). That should be good enough to keep adverse groups separated while avoiding the issue of "I'm not abusing them, I'm calling them out" that's already mentioned elsewhere.
prawn 12y ago
What if a user could toggle a setting through which users of a certain type couldn't @reply them at all? e.g., accounts created within the last month, or accounts with fewer than 50 tweets, etc.
A_COMPUTER 12y ago
1) kind of already happens, they can mention but it's not linked, which is laughably enough to prevent a significant degree of mobbing by their own followers. 2) Someone in the atheist-skeptic community made a tool called the blockbot that ostensibly was to automatically block people from a list that you never want to talk to in the first place because the blockbot operator already identified them as trolls. Unfortunately the main reason was that the developer figured out that mass blocks caused an automated response mechanism to suspend that users. It was really an offensive, not defensive mechanism. This has been somewhat changed, but the reason I bring it up is that this has been tried by Twitter and unscrupulous people used it as an attack tool. 3) is similar to 2) but I suspect they are already doing this in some cases.

andreasvc 12y ago

I don't think anonymity is the real issue, although it makes trolling easier. Services such as Facebook and Youtube require real names, yet they still have lots of people trolling each other. I think it is rather the feeling of being able to get away with it which causes people to have an illusion of anonymity, whether or not there name/phone number is actually associated with their account. I'm curious if it isn't feasible to do traffic analysis and nip trollers in the bud when it turns out that one or more twitterers are sending a large number of tweets to a single person without an actual conversation taking place.

masklinn 12y ago
> I don't think anonymity is the real issue, although it makes trolling easier. Anonymity isn't the real issue (though it's a compounding factor), the issue is how easy throwaway accounts are to create: for victims of abuse, it's not possible to "manage" abuse by blocking abuser accounts because within seconds they can be on a new yet-to-be-blocked account. In fact, I'd expect most serial abusers don't even bother waiting, they create an account, throw a salvo of abuse, create a new account, new salvo, and the account creation can be trivially automated. If accounts are either cheap and unique (based on "real-world" identity) or relatively expensive (time-wise) but anonymous, the ability to block people becomes far more useful for the serially abused.

DanBC 12y ago

There are plenty of people who are fine being vile human beings on their normal accounts under their real names. http://www.salon.com/2014/12/10/whats_up_with_the_rag_head_when_i_starred_in_a_facebook_ad/ http://www.salon.com/2014/12/10/whats_up_with_the_rag_head_w... > “What terrorist group does this guy belong too?” > “this is horrible, Facebook should be promoted by a different person, i have lost a lot of respect for Facebook because of there choice to use this person.” > “Can I borrow your towel on your head I ran out of toilet paper please sir?” > “What’s up with the rag head?” > “Get that Isis terrorist off of your ad” > “Get this camel jockey off my news feed pronto!”

josephlord 12y ago
And they can be banned with a real cost to the owner. The decision about whether or not particular things cross the ban line is separate from the design of a system that imposes a real impact when the ban occurs. Also in the context of harassment they can be blocked by the person being harassed

prawn 12y ago

Definitely worth considering but any significant impedance to joining the network would have a financial cost for Twitter in terms of adoption, and would never get up.

dexen 12y ago

Teamspeak v3† solves this in an interesting way: the program supports creation of anonymous (or rather, pseudonymous) identities easily, each associated with an unique ID which takes adjustable amount of time to compute on users' computers. The adjustable parameter, called "Security Level", is expressed as a small integer. To protect from flood of new (spam) identities, channel owners / operators can select minimum difficulty allowed on the channel. The higher the Security Level required, the more time it takes to create such identity. Values around 24 represent a dozen seconds worth of computation, while around 28 is a few minutes.‡ This easily discourages casual spammers, while legit users have no problem with spending a few dozen seconds, or a few minutes to create an identity. † VoIP team chat, used by gamers. ‡ more information: http://forum.teamspeak.com/showthread.php/47502-Security-level-huh http://forum.teamspeak.com/showthread.php/47502-Security-lev...