> 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.
I think that in practice the problem comes down to preventing sociopathic sadists from annoying everyone in complicated ways. The actual level of anonymity doesn't really matter but there are classes of solutions that work better without.
The only possible non-technical solution for that class of user would be to track them down in real life and fine them. The possible abuse associated with such a scheme make that sort of solution unattractive.
The conversation didn’t start with that. The conversation started with widespread abuse online originating from anonymous accounts.
Communities without abuse problems never even float the idea of banning anonymity. One reason being it’s extremely expensive to do that if not effectively impossible.
It's not just anonymity, it's anonymity coupled with a lack of consequences.
The ideal solution would be to make users sign in through their Facebook page, but then let them comment under whatever pseudonym they wanted. That way commenters could have anonymity, but abusive users could still be permanently banned.
It doesn't de-anonymize someone, but it's a much bigger hurdle than an email address, which is free and someone can get on a whim. More friction could curb troll accounts.
"it was not clear how a requirement to provide personal details to open an account would reduce online abuse as many people already make cruel comments under their real names"
Yeah, that's the thing. You don't need anonymity. All you need is the distance created by the Internet.
What's needed, in my opinion, is less about unmasking, and more about using existing laws. Police don't take threats seriously, much less mere defamation. There are things that clearly cross a legal line, but can't be prosecuted or brought into court because it's too much work.
Anonymity doesn't help the situation, since one of the reasons they never pursue threats is that it's hard to prove that somebody actually said the thing. It was hacked, it's a fake account, etc.
The bar is high, deliberately, but that puts a heavy burden on those who are the target of trolls. Don't dismiss it; just because most death threats are vacuous doesn't make them irrelevant, and just because it's hard to prove damage from defamation doesn't mean it's zero.
I dislike the notion that the laws as they are are somehow perfect and therefore anything not currently prosecutable is your own problem. Laws can shift the burdens around, and while imperfect, the current situation isn't perfect, either. Even merely "different" can have benefits.
>> "What I’ve observed is the opposite—that anonymity facilitates honest discourse, creates a level playing field for ideas to be heard, and enables creativity like none other."
One big counterpoint to this I can see is ask.fm. People are given total anonymity and they use it to berate and bully others (I believe it's also lead to several suicides). Anonymity can work great if the community is good. Here on HN I think it works pretty well. On ask.fm it clearly worked horribly but only because the community using it used it that way.
In the end I think it's all down to the people using the service and anonymity or true identity plays only a very small role.
Edit: and the downsides of anonymity can been seen below in '784927489234's comment.
> I fully understand some people need anonymity and pseudonimity. But the general case
I think we often underestimate the need to have these spaces active and available just to leave room for such people.
If /b/ is where people post bizarre anonymous trash, and Facebook is where people have serious conversations about serious issues, what do the people who need anonymity do? Go on Facebook and tell their families "hey, you should go have some of this discussion in those weird anonymous forums you've heard are full of evil people, no reason, nothing to do with me having a trait you'd hate me for"?
I don't mean to be snarky, this is a genuinely hard problem. But "people who need anonymity" are by definition a group you can't wait to accommodate when they speak up and ask for it.
Facebook's real name policies regularly cause problems for everyone from American trans people to Bangladeshi atheists, and go far beyond that in silencing discussion on topics where a totally conventional opinion might offend an employer or family member. (Or perhaps Customs and Border Patrol, which can't prove how many Reddit accounts someone has but apparently challenges claims of not having a Facebook profile.)
I don't think anonymity has to be a descent to the bottom. Comparing different subreddits, or HN to 4chan, or any other pair of anonymous sites, demonstrates that. I do think anonymity and the need for moderation tend to trade against one another; anonymous fora without oversight quickly become toxic, or are simply eaten by spammers.
But I'm very concerned that real name policies look good because anonymity causes highly visible bad behavior, while identity silently pushes vulnerable people out of the discussion.
> I guess the only website I can think of that allows comments and is super-popular with the general public is Facebook, but since it's sorta-non-anonymous, people don't spill hatred all over the place.
That's actually a very interesting point.
I think a lot of the stereotypical poor Internet comments only exist because the author is anonymous and is talking to a faceless account. (Not all of it, of course, some of it is probably due to the communications medium.) I can't find the original post that I liked, but this one[0] has some interesting information on allowing an attacker to identify with a victim. I would think that would apply in this case too some extent.
If you actually had to vouch for what you said and what you said online were associated with you as a person, and you had a ballpark idea of who you were talking to, I think people would add more filters to themselves. That kind of social pressure is largely self-policing. Jerks will be jerks, but hopefully fewer non-jerks would turn into jerks.
I like the option of anonymity, but in all honesty I think it mostly just helps the edge cases, not large-scale discussion. Is it any wonder that Facebook and Google have tried to enforce "real names" policies and the Play store now links all reviews to a G+ account? There are other reasons for those moves, but it can't hurt to encourage the civility that accountability brings. Anonymity can bring out both the best and worst in people.
> This will be a contested opinion, but I believe full anonymity allows people to become the worst version of themselves.
> …
> On a higher level pov, anonymity allows some of the most toxic and damaging ideas to brew and fester.
You mention Twitter, but haven’t mentioned Facebook. That anonymity makes people to become or expose the worst version of themselves — or that anonymity allows some of the most toxic and damaging ideas to brew and fester — isn’t necessarily completely true. On Facebook, people use their real names, post personal photos (including participation in local events), their location, etc., and there’s still a huge amount of toxic ideas from these same non-anonymous people that brew there and are allowed to (because that makes the company more money).
I don’t disagree that anonymity allows people to be more honest in expressing themselves without filters. It’s one of the best things that happened with the Internet. But completely banning or not allowing anonymity isn’t the solution that some may immediately reach out for when faced with some social problems. Usually the people who dislike anonymity and want to eliminate it (I’m not saying it’s you) are those in power or want to be in power. And they don’t like it when people can organize outside their surveillance view.
I don't disagree that anonymity offers protection against situations like this, but bear in mind that anonymity is very much a factor in the lack of civil discourse online. I'm not suggesting for a second that stripping anonymity is a solution to any of these problems, but personally I feel like I'm less likely to engage in the sort of behavior which might invite an angry mob while posting under my real name.
>Most of the foulest people are actually adults with jobs or surly teenagers. The kids are fine.
Removal of anonymity will help to settle this one.
Please notice how I don't simply propose removal of anonymity as using real name in your online image. I am proposing a way to lose anonymity in exchange of overriding the management when you have a collusion.
A woman here is explaining that she prefers to interact anonymously or pseudonymously on the internet in order to avoid vicious abuse, amply demonstrated in screenshots. I find it very alarming that a significant part of the response here is to suggest that we should therefore eliminate anonymity and pseudonymity on the internet in order to force people to behave better.
This suggested measure would force this woman, and others, to face this vicious abuse all the time, with no escape except not to use the internet.
This seems like a bad idea. Problems like this are precisely why we must protect the rights to anonymity and pseudonymity, and indeed work to make them normative. (And that's without even getting into the fact that real-names policies have been conclusively shown not to make people behave better.)
The massive point of difference to real life has to be the anonymity, but defence of the anonymous lies at the heart of the problem. I don't want to pretend removal of anonymity is "the answer" because many people depend on it for personal safety.
I just mean that it's the principle difference. That said there's a class of troll who does it openly and apparently without consequence. I think in the "real world" the harassment would be more subject to law. Odd.
> Removing the possibility for anonymity could solve the problem of online toxicity.
Except that it's not possible. And worse, it's just hard enough to evade that only those with malicious goals will manage it.
> Large internet corporations like Google and Facebook allow all to create an account on condition that some personally identifiable information is revealed, usually a phone number.
Also Signal, sadly enough :(
> The benefit is that it deters most from repeatably creating new accounts when older accounts have been flagged or banned due to improper behavior. These companies gain the function of "identity provider": they manage your online identity that can be used to login in different locations of the internet. We all know many websites that offer a "Google login" or "Facebook login".
Yes, it "deters most". And mainly it deters vulnerable people, who need ~anonymity to protect themselves from adversaries. It doesn't deter spammers, trolls, scammers, bot operators, and such. There are just so many ways to use multiple phone numbers. Ranging from free websites to SIM banks. And actually, it's easier just to buy accounts, either fresh or old (which probably means stolen).
So even without getting into concerns about corporate gatekeepers, it's clear that this is a misguided approach.
>Incidentally I don't think your "total privacy" solution will work as we live more of our lives online. People will post PII. It's almost impossible for most people not to.
If I hand a criminal a gun and he shoots me, perhaps I should not have given him a gun? I don't defend the criminal for shooting me, that isn't right either, but it was preventable. I find it hard to emphasize with people who willingly choose to hand their abusers weapons to beat them. The choice was theirs and the outcome predictable.
There are people, like me, whom exist without a Facebook. Without a Twitter. Who post very little, or sometimes fabricated details, of their personal lives. We exist and function in society but have opted out of placing ourselves at risk by sharing our PII with the world. We refuse to give others a weapon. Not surprisingly, I never hear about an anonymous user being abused. It's always someone with a name. Someone with an identity. Someone who has provided people with something to attack.
People have nothing to attack about me but my opinions - and I'm always willing to defend my opinions; rather than asking my opinions not be attacked.
While de-anonymising users may or may not work to stop individual trolling and other abuse (the jury is still out); it most definitely enables organized troll groups. Therefore it's actually not a good idea at all.
> By now, just about everyone has hadone of their previously normal-seeming friends or relatives go on an insane political rant on Facebook, or had a Twitter troll show up in their replies, or read just about any comment on YouTube. People act in these horrible ways because they can, because real or effective anonymity lets them do so
Your friends aren't anonymous on facebook. Yes, anonymous facebook accounts are possible, but the damage is done by verified users. Anonymity is NOT the problem people think it is.
Unfortunately an even larger subset of the population doesn't need anonymity to act nasty to others, while their victims often need it to prevent it escalating. Google's attempts to force real names on Youtube comments to reduce spam and bad behavior have been... less than impressive in effect. In a lot of discussions if you force real names you ensure that those with the most to lose (and often the most at stake) are also the most vulnerable.
Even presuming that counter to actual experience the generic trolls are deterred by a real names policy, there are others who become a much bigger problem when they've got access to real identities. Why do you think doxing is considered such a big thing? SWATing, offline stalking, physical assault, etc. are all risks as soon as a harasser has your info. Even worse when you're talking about something like domestic violence support groups there's a very real danger of the abuser escalating if they discover the victim has been talking to other people. That's 2.1 million people in the US alone who report physical assault by a partner in a single year who could really use access to resources without revealing themselves.
Anonymity on the internet would make it easier for people to tweet about trivial stuff without exposing their meatspace identity. The fact that we expect people to reveal their "Real Names" on social media is a huge facilitator for abuse.
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.
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