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Comment by buraequete | Hacker News Reader

Can't social media enforce a harder stance to eliminate fake accounts? Forcing real info & phone number usage, constant re-validation on suspected accounts, asking real photos, with real IDs, confirmation by others etc.. I think many trolls would simply disappear if their identities are public. Maybe anonymity shouldn't be a thing in social media?

Though such enforcements are also not the best, then the tech companies are given too much power. Hard topic, but just asking people to be careful is never going to be enough, so much passion out there, people will reply. Or real discussion will be watered down when real people are called bots.

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https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nymwars

There are arguably legitimate reasons not to use your real name online, including "I don't wanna."

I agree, anonymity is really important online, but for social media, maybe it should not be the case? One can go and be anonymous in different platforms already, and if it is a really big concern, they can just evade social media altogether.

Why allow fake account pollution in bigger networks, that are affecting so much of our real life politics today? So much trolling and social engineering are being done through fake accounts, the best solution is a very harsh validation.

Leaving aside the reasons mentioned above about why being anonymous is really important, there's another reason: money.

I think it is wildly accepted that major social networks are full of ghost and/or inactive accounts. If companies cracked down on those, everyone would see that their numbers are not accurate and their valuation would take a big hit. Some CEOs would lose their jobs for sure. So it is not in the big networks' self-interest to change that.

You could make a network from scratch, were identity is baked in from the start. But who would sign up? If Google+ thought us anything it's that people really hate giving their real names (and rightfully so, IMHO). Sure, some services managed it, but they are not as influential as the big ones.

So no new service has the network effects to pull it off, no big network wants to lose money on doing it, and users don't want it.

There needs to be anonymous accounts on the internet because of safety. However someone you need to be able to derive a system that permits you to validate you are an individual internally to the system, but also allow for anonymity externally. This way the anonymous speaker is protected, but you still know that it is a real person, just not for you to know who. Of course the anonymous person could be a bad actor (whatever you define that to be) but at least its not a bot.

> One can go and be anonymous in different platforms already, and if it is a really big concern, they can just evade social media altogether.

Anonymity is a hard requirement of free speech. Free speech is a hard requirement of democracy. Some topics can only be safely discussed under anonymity. Some opinions can only be expressed anonymously, especially today in the age of outrage cancel culture where angry mobs seek to shut down and de-platform any views they are opposed to.

Ultimately, de-platforming anonymous speech is a pretty heavy-handed form of censorship.

The tool to combat social media manipulation is education and promotion of critical thinking. Not censorship.

> Maybe anonymity shouldn't be a thing […]?

I see that it’s time to link to this again:

https://geekfeminism.wikia.org/wiki/Who_is_harmed_by_a_%22Re...

In short: requiring “Real Names” is a really terrible idea.

All that does is allow these groups to draw up enemies lists, and then go after the family, livelihood, and reputations of people who support views they disagree with.

I think social media companies can do more to eliminate fake accounts, but I would stop at the point of being too draconian about using real names.

What is going to keep coming up as an issue, is how actively social media companies want to police users and content. If you take a hands off approach, trolls and government influence ops will run rampant. But moderating is tricky business and you don't want to become a sort of digital police state.

Not to mention that it can be very difficult to combat fake news. Should Twitter and Facebook have fact-checking operations to prevent pernicious fake news from spreading? Consider that in Myanmar, propaganda spread on Facebook contributed to mass killings of Rohingya.

Lots of tough problems to tackle.

Perhaps more that the apparent “reality” of an online identity could be correlate-able with opinions expressed by the identity. I would be more interested in posts by a verified identity in a forum on political topics than in those from an unverified identity. On the other hand, in a forum about some fictional work, quality of content would be of more interest.

Problems arise when supposedly “real” identities misrepresent their actual identity, location, allegiance, etc. in a context where those things are expected to be trusted, and then abuse that trust.

A major problem with this is, that our politicians also use the same inflammatory tatics to gain power. cyber publicists also understand that being inflammatory means more clicks and interactions. So you don't need an actual "enemy" with fake accounts to inflame and degrade the conversation. The current attention economy provides perfect incentives for inflaming the conversation. I think getting rid of fake identities wouldn't matter much.

Foreign manipulation only provides more fuel and maybe direct the flames where it's more suitable for the attacker.

Anyway, the medium is the message. Social media is just bad for mass communication. Attention economy is bad for meaningful discourse and thus bad for democracy.

I agree, social media should require validation that you are a real person.

Most social media platforms I use already do, but maybe not enough, or maybe most can be tricked easily. Another problem is that those platforms do not care at all since they value the # of users, regardless of them being fake or not.

Time to time they do these "clean-ups", just to save face it feels like.

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