Anonymity is a separate problem from immunity, but the former certainly is perceived as a successful route to the latter.

Those people posting to Facebook under their own name are living under the belief that their words are protected speech, and that no harm will come to them in their community for speaking them. So, too, do anonymous identities perceive themselves to be immune to harm. Communities in the southeast United States have been quietly passing racism and sexism by word of mouth for hundreds of years, and they are quite correct to think that posts on Facebook will do no significant harm to their lives, as long as they don’t stray far from their communities. They derive courage from seeing others say these terrible things, and they say them too. Anonymity is of no relevance to their concerns, because they have unity across community and authority to protect their cruel and malicious beliefs.

Anonymous identities present this problem at scale, where the community is “anonymous identities” and the authorities are the businesses that run the Internet. For decades we built these platforms, I helped build these platforms, and we’ve discovered that we’ve created a place that allows social evils of all sorts to coordinate and fester and grow and feed upon those who are vulnerable. The platforms have so many users that policing speech is impossible, and in the few cases such as Nextdoor or Yelp where locality narrows speech down to enforceable-scale communities, the platforms shy away from the simple human cost of moderating speech and applying principles, desiring instead to maximize daily active users and advertising views and paid subscriptions and minimize dollars spent on human oversight and moral compass wayfinding in these community bulletin boards they’ve created.

In the novel Snow Crash and in many works prior, the Tower of Babel is an allegory for the risk of all humanity being able to thoughtlessly communicate. It’s not that different languages are unintelligible, but it’s simply that they slow communication, ensuring that one community cannot readily infect another with malicious beliefs and cultism. We have torn down the barriers between communities that kept the uncivilized, the evil, from metastasizing throughout the world. And so we who built blogs from the ashes of Fidonet and Usenet have created a perfect agar dish for a plague that threatens to kill us all.

Sock puppets are a unique feature of anonymity, that slow any single entity to represent themselves as a crowd, and human beings are extremely vulnerable to crowdthink manipulation by those actors. This can’t readily be done without anonymity, and is a problem unique to anonymity itself. 4chan could not have wielded an army of sock puppets in Gamergate and beyond, if users had been required to authenticate their true selves at each forum they coordinated attacks upon. Even if their identities were unpublished, they would be found and banned, and eventually the equivalent of Spamcop would be set up to coordinate disreputation tracking with published proof of the misbehavior of the identity in question. It isn’t necessary to publish the identity of an attacker to indicate that they attacked you, and the invaluable contribution of centralized Twitter blocklist subscriptions demonstrates that we are still very capable of silencing voices that are deemed beyond the pale.

It’s uncomfortable to consider the morality of when, if, voices should be silenced. But I’m tired of this world where consequence-free verbal abuse is taken for granted, and anonymity contributes uniquely to that in ways that cannot be assigned to the greater problem of community bulletin boards at worldwide scale. So, yes, I call for ways to verify identities that are sufficient to stop this army of manipulative sockpuppets that swarm any platform without active identity verification.

HN suffers these attacks too; witness how any post about ESR or China or gender inequity is guaranteed to have a freshly-registered account posting plausibly-formed comments that somehow always push the discussion towards a world with more bias, more inequity, more tolerances of abusive behaviors. We don’t see sockpuppets swarming discussions asking us to keep an open mind and be more civil towards each other and have empathy for the viewpoints of both sides. We see sockpuppets pushing authoritarianism and bigotry instead. They do so freely, knowing that their attacks are impossible to detect and stop with any algorithm.

MasterCard paid nearly a billion dollars today for an online identity verification startup, because they understand that the future we’re living is so terrible that it won’t be allowed to continue. Sockpuppets are an unprofitable drain upon the financial profits of capitalism. Tor and VPNs are frequently banned at a network level due to anonymous abusive behaviors committed upon them, and that simply won’t scale. Cloudflare’s own 1.1.1.1 VPN is blocked by Slice, a pizza delivery app, using Cloudflare’s own CDN firewall services, no doubt because the anonymity was abused for stolen credit card testing and in general abuse at scale. I wouldn’t be inclined to accept traffic from TOR if I ran a business, not unless I was doing live ID checks in some way that isn’t as trivial to falsify or hack as the weak solutions we’re offered by phone and email today.

If you are able to present a case that the sockpuppets problem is in fact common to anonymous communities (such as HN) and to identity-verified communities (I can’t name any, can you?), then I’d like an opportunity to consider your arguments along those lines. Your case is not yet compelling, but I’m open to hearing more.