by intended | 2025-06-02 05:10:01+00:00
>But in an online forum where the bully is known and can be banned/blocked permanently, everyone can fight back.

Firstly, please acknowledge that knowing the identity of the attacker doesn’t stop bullying. Ignoring or papering over it, deprives arguments of supports that are required to be useful in the real world.

There is a reason I pointed out that it doesn’t stop harassment, because it disproves the contention that anonymity is the causal force for harassment.

The argument for reducing harassment via anonymity is supported, but it results in other issues. In a fully de-anonymized national social media platform, people will target minorities, immigrants and nations from other countries. I.E whatever is the acceptable jingoism and majority view point. Banning such conversation will put the mods in the cross hairs.

And yes, if it reduced harassment by 80%, that would be something. However the gains are lower (from that paper, it seemed like a 12% difference).

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I am taking great pains to separate out misinfo from bullying / harassment.

For misinformation, the first section, about minute 3 to minute 4, where Rob Faris speaks, does a better job of articulating the modern mechanics : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGTmuHeFdAo

The larger issue for misinformation, is that it has utility for certain political groups and users today. It allows them the ability to create narratives and political speech faster and more effectively.

Making a more nuanced point will end up with me elaborating on my personal views on market capture for ideas. The shortest point i can make about misinformation, journalism and moderation is this:

Factual accuracy is expensive, and an uncompetitive product, when you are competing in a market that is about engagement. Right now, I don’t see journalism, science, policy - slow, fact and process limited systems, competing with misinformation.

Solving the misinformation problem will require figuring out how to create a fair fight / fair competition, between facts and misinformation.

Since misinformation purveyors can argue they have freedom of speech, and since they are growing increasingly enmeshed with political power structures, simple moves like banning are shifting risk to moderators and platforms - all of whom have a desire to keep living their lives without having to be harassed.

For what it’s worth, I would have argued the same thing as you until a few scant months ago. The most interesting article I read showed that the amount of misinformation that is consumed is a stable % of total content consumed. Indicating that while supply and production capacity of misinformation may increase, the demand is limited. This coupled with the variety of ways misinformation can be presented, and the ineffectiveness of fact checkers at stopping uptake, forced a rethinking of how to effectively address all that is going on.

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I don’t have information on how behavior is in a verified context. I have some inklings of seeing this at some point, and eventually being convinced this was not a solution. I’ll have to see if I end up finding something.

I think one of the issues is that verification is onerous, and results in a case where you can lose your ID and then have all the real world challenges that come with it, while losing the benefits that come from being online. There’s a chilling effect on speech in both directions. Anonymity was pretty critical to me being able to even learn enough to make the arguments I am making, or to converse with people here.

If theres a TLDR to my position, it’s that the ills we are talking about are symptoms of dysfunction in how our ecosystem is behaving. So these solutions will only shift the method by which they are expressed. I would agree that it’s a question of tradeoffs. To which my question is what are we getting for what ground we are conceding.