I actually don’t think this is true, and I think the evidence of what happened when YouTube started requiring real names speaks against it. People who are likely to worry about being identified online (lawyers who don’t want their clients to find them/two be asked for legal advice; teachers who don’t want their students to identify them; professionals who know future employers might look up what they said and don’t want to make controversial statements; etc.) are far more likely to be reasonable than people who don’t give a shit what anyone thinks of them.
This is a bit tangential to the article, which doesn’t call for a real name policy on twitter (and I don’t think you are either) but I think too much bad behaviour is credited to anonymity. The saying goes, “Ethics is what you do when no one is looking.” I think that actually a majority of people are fairly ethical.
I’m not going to get into a protracted debate about this, I’m just saying my piece and I’ll let it stand, but here goes: If you get banned/blocked/whatever, I think it’s best to just not bother trying to get unbanned/unblocked/whatever. Someone has expressed that they don’t want to hear from you or that you aren’t welcome in a space, the sensible thing to do is to just walk away. You can think of it as respecting their decision or as not wasting your time on them, whatever makes you feel better. This is the advice I’d apply to my own brother if he told me in person he didn’t want to talk to me anymore, I don’t know what the point is investing time and effort to get strangers on the internet to unblock you.
While normally I would agree in this case I think most (all?) of these people are using a shared block list they got from BlockTogether compiled by a guy who a later admitted lots of people got lumped in there because of the way it was compiled. These are people I just quietly followed for years, never tweeted to. I’d be very surprised if they even know I exist.
This is the problem with all these “solutions” that get thrown up. To solve an admittedly serious problem for a minority of the userbase you end up creating problems for others, effectively breaking the system and undermining utility and trust.
I wrote a (respectful) letter, I didn’t start a campaign It was cathartic and then I let it go.
it strikes me as outlandishly hypocritical for some prominent, white male members of the anti-GamerGate movement to suggest that anonymity should be limited in response to the GamerGate controversy; we’re in agreement that marginalized groups should be protected, but I sincerely doubt any form of identity management upheld by a corporation such as Twitter, Google, or Facebook would end well for any groups who actually rely on anonymity on the internet.
Every suggestion I’ve seen so far has involved verifying identities and restricting interaction between verified and unverified accounts. It strikes me that the people who will most likely remain unverified are ones who face institutionalized violence - a perspective, that perhaps, we here in our privileged part of the internet where we COULD admit our real identities need to face more often.
Facebook already has identity management. Google often requires cell phone or other verification for final steps or to use certain features. Twitter is the loosest of them all, and it’s where abuse has focused lately because of their paucity of tools.
I don’t know, because you’re anonymous, if you’re white and male; I suspect you are because you refer to marginalized groups as the other. So you’re using other people as the shield for your opinions, and asserting you know what they think and feel. (If you’re not both white and male, then your use of language is odd, because it’s not one of association and identity with the groups that you indicate need what you’re stating.)
Speaking from my own experience, and not about that of others, what I wrote about in the article is the notion of some level of accountability to prevent abuse, not the mandatory elimination of anonymity, which is a powerful tool, even though it has two (or more) sharp edges.
Exactly that. Some commenters on this thread and elsewhere assert the strawman that I’m proposing an end to anonymity on Twitter. But I think of it as you do, Jeff: positionally, it’s about who can reach us. If you’re the frequent victim of abuse, you’d be glad to turn a dial to prevent attackers who choose to be fully anonymous (or as anonymous as possible) from reaching you, giving you a safe space on Twitter. That isn’t censorship, choosing one’s own space. And Twitter apparently has such controls (per Verge article) already in testing.
I subscribed to Randi Harper’s ggautoblocker via Block Together, and it had this effect for me. A few weeks ago, thousands of people flooded my mentions because I was going to tape a podcast. (I’m not a games journalist; I wasn’t interviewing one.) Because Twitter is a key social and professional conduit to me, and because I try to listen to people, I let it flow and learned a lot. But when it came time to shut down the nonsense, I had to block 100s individually. Randi’s generated list helped enormously. Twitter is now useful again.
I’d like Twitter to incorporate controls that make it useful to each person on it — which means that some people will not be heard by others who choose not to hear them.
I know that those sites have identity management already - I’m suggesting that those are already an issue. With programs like PRISM, and the known number of surveillance requests that the US government alone makes against social networks, can you really say with a straight face that these entities will protect the identity of anyone who trusts them with verifiable information?
I’m not asserting that I know what marginalized groups think or feel. Only what they publish online, and make available for me to read. My point is that this sort of contact will be more difficult as we continue to lock down common points of communication on the internet. That is a problem. I want to see the Arab springs and Ferguson revolts. I want the people who are part of those movements to be able to reach me via the internet. They can do that right now, precisely because twitter has looser requirements than other social media.
I understand that you aren’t moving to abolish anonymity entirely – but if that’s the case, what is stopping you from using one of the social networks that have tighter regulations? Why do you have to lock down the one where people can take part in discussions without providing their identity to a corporate third party who may or may not provide that information to an employer or intelligence agency?
What heuristic will your blocker services use that can distinguish between a GG troll (who are total assholes by the way - I’m not disagreeing there) and a protestor at a rally, who had to create a new account to prevent their identity being used to track them down and arrest them? How can we facilitate that kind of communication while still providing the safety you’re looking for?
A possible alternative to shadowbanning/hellbanning is the bipartite user graph.
I forget which video game it was, but one of them set up a system where people who cheated would get routed to one set of servers, and people who didn’t cheat would get a different set. So if you cheated, your interactions would all be with other cheats.
Seems to me you could do something similar with Twitter. If you troll or are abusive, you get to inhabit Troll Twitter where everyone is screaming at each other. The rest of us get to live on Regular Twitter.
They already have this data, so we’re already dealing with the consequences. I don’t trust the US government (or any government) to work within limits. However, I continue to want to use the Internet to communicate, so I understand that as I work. Other people with serious needs for privacy and anonymity wouldn’t be affected by the changes I suggest, because there’s zero chance Twitter would eliminate its email-only verification because it would stall growth.
So if you’re arguing from the standpoint that a) Twitter doesn’t capture a huge amount of data already or b) that I’m saying anonymity on Twitter should be removed (privately to Twitter) for all accounts, neither of those things is true. Twitter has a lot of data (IP addresses, etc.); I’m arguing for tiered verification with opt in.
Ok, so that’s where I think you’re being naive. Twitter captures enough information already, combined with government monitoring, that any illusion of anonymity provided solely by Twitter is just that. Anyone who doesn’t take many additional steps outside of just an email-registration loop with Twitter would be easily exposed.
This is about the reader, not the poster. So Twitter users who want to block anonymous accounts, newly registered ones, etc. — that’s going to be their choice. And you know that the GG block list is based on people who follow the chief jerks/abusers, right? So that can be tweaked. If you don’t follow five or so key accounts, then you’re not on that list.
And a blocklist is a different thing from the ability to throttle or shape what you, as an individual choose to see, as opposed to what Twitter chooses to show us.
The bigger threat? Twitter adopting a Facebook-style “what they think is important (what sells ads)” view. That would surely eliminate controversial issues and dissent more readily than any tiered verification option.
I mean, that’s the point! If those people are taking those extra steps to safeguard their identity, that would inherently prevent them from providing information to twitter to be put on the ‘safe poster’ white list, wouldn’t it? Those are all the same techniques that GG-jerks are using, aren’t they?
Right now, Twitter doesn’t choose anything, does it? So if some sort of whitelist or throttling were to be put in place, what default parameters should it enforce? How does this not lead to massive echo chambers? How will this prevent extremism, when all it does is isolate the different factions on any given issue until they end up with an irrational and vitriolic hatred of people with different ideas?
Then how does it protect you? Isn’t the issue that these people can’t be blocked because they keep creating new accounts? Are they taking the time to follow one of the GG assholes before they start using these fresh accounts to harass?
Won’t harvesting more identity information just incentivize this behavior? I thought that was exactly why facebook and google were so dead set on validating identity in the first place - not to protect their community, but because it made their ad dollars worth more. Won’t having this information just make it more difficult for twitter to keep any impartiality that it has in the face of mounting pressure to return a profit?
What we are looking at is the de-democratisation of Twitter. Twitter was sold to a lot of its users based on its flat structure. “Hey you can follow celebrities, you can even tweet to them.” Now people are advocating gated communities in what used to be a commons.
KFC are on the GG blocklist, what did they do ? What about the people who follow others with different viewpoints just to keep informed, you often see on Twitter profiles: “retweets are not endorsements” but now suddenly a follow indicates support and merely listening to someone merits exclusion ? Isn’t this the definition of thoughtcrime ?
Shared blocklists are already excluding people who did nothing but be blocked but someone with a lot of clout at one point. It’s the pinnacle of clique forming: piss off one person for whatever reason and face social exile. Add to that the blocking of new users, or users with no followers or even worse the wrong followers and you very effectively stop the influx of new users, unless “blessed” by someone already in the know, too. Remember when blocked users do not even have read only access to someone’s tweets. This is the desert we are contemplating sending new users into here. No doubt this appeals to the same set who are always mad about joining the latest invite-only fad app of the week but it’s a potent recipe for the complete balkanisation of Twitter.
I’ll call it a thoughtcrime when the government prosecutes you for following people on twitter. If other people look at who you follow on twitter and decide they don’t want to listen to you, what’s wrong with that?
There are 271 million monthly active users. That’s over 100 tweets a second if every one of them tweets just one a month. What should people do to figure out which of these tweets to read and which to ignore? If they are famous, then simply reading everything that is tweeted at them might be out of the question. In the case of the GG list, people don’t want to read invective and threats.
Basically, they are 100% willing to exclude 100 million people to avoid reading a few hate-tweets directed at them. You are talking about “democratization” but part of democracy is letting people make their own decisions. No one has a “use my block list” mind control ray.
If others want to get together and ban everyone whose account name starts with H then I probably don’t want to join their block list, I would probably thing that was dumb, and if it came to it, I would think myself lucky not to interact with anyone who actually thought that was a good idea.
(There is no valid analogy here to a list that blocks people based on their inclusion in an otherwise oppressed or vulnerable group. A member of a racial minority that is generally badly treated can’t just laugh off being excluded based on their race because it fits in as part of a larger problem. This is how GG will frame these kinds of block lists, but GG isn’t actually an oppressed minority.)
They don’t though. They have the decision made for them by others and the more of these blocklist get created the more the mistakes will be compounded. Let’s face it, people aren’t going to go through these lists to see who’s actually on them and those who are on there by mistake have no recourse.
And tweets by @KFC apparently.
No it seems entirely reasonable, as censorship always does. And it will lead to abuse and unintended consequences, as censorship always does.
I feel your comment is adequately addressed by something I said in the comment you are responding to:
Yes, they are willing to sacrifice getting tweets about the Colonel’s delicious chicken. I don’t see how that isn’t their choice.
If there are people out there abusing this kind of group list then people who are using the list ought to be made aware of that. For example, if someone made a GG block list based on a small number of published criteria, but then later was discovered to have added their ex to it, we might say that was the wrong thing to do, suggest that people don’t use the list, and suggest that people don’t trust that person in the future to make lists. If there isn’t an adequate mechanism for suggesting you are on a list erroneously, then that’s unfortunate, but anyone making these lists right now is probably getting hate and threats of their own just for making the list, and understandably won’t want to open up a whole new channel of communication.
Either the people using these lists are human beings who are able to make reasonable choices about what lists they want to use or they are helpless dupes. If they are the latter, then who cares if they can’t see what you or anyone else is saying? If they are the former, why not just respect their decision?
At some point in my life, things changed, and everyone decided that they need more attention. Attention from strangers. The high-IQ witty people use their humor and smarts to get attention, but the truth is that few people have the chops to be noticed in a world where millions of people are spewing Tweets out.
The other way to get noticed is much easier: Be horrible.
Why do we feel this deep need to grab the attention of people we don’t know? Are we all so insecure now that we MUST be validated by “likes” and online responses be they positive or outraged?
I encountered the blocklist problematics first-hand in the field of email spam.
There is a number of blocklists and realtime-blackholes. It is easy to get on one, one wormed computer is often enough. It is less easy to get off one. You do not have a choice which list is your business partner(s)'s IT department using. You want or need to communicate with them. It may be even in their own interest, too, but you have to fight with the blacklist operator; most are easy but a few are (or were when I was in charge of email) pretty difficult. But at least there were ways to get off the list, as antispam and blackhole people may sometimes be a bit too harsh but usually(!) aren’t entirely capricious.
The worst cases were when we inherited an IP address or block with “bad reputation”.
There should be some sort of an appeal process for any sort of a blacklist. Especially that with automated or semiautomated, non-complaint-based, inclusion. Adding somebody just because of following somebody else, or on a whim of a computer running a questionable algorithm, should be a big fat no-no; that itself could act as a massive chilling effect, leaving people to worry whom they should listen to and who carries a risk.
Vaguely kind of like avoiding dissidents from fear that the secret police could become interested in you if you talk, with, or even are seen merely passively associating with, them. Different consequences but the same mechanism that can cause you problems.
A large corporation really ought to have an appeals process for any blacklist they have for their own good. An individual who is sharing things with their friends doesn’t have an obligation to provide any level of service.
I really find comparisons to secret police, government censorship, and so on to be hyperbolic. I think more than anything else that’s why I entered the conversation. Someone not reading your tweets just isn’t anything like getting a knock on the door in the middle of the night.
It was cathartic and then I let it go.