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Comment by coderdude | Hacker News Reader

Have you ever played an online game or seen a 40 minute old throwaway account used to attack someone? Fake email addresses to send hate mail. Twilio numbers used to call and harass people. If someone feels like they can deliver abuse anonymously then they're certainly more likely to do so. What I bet you haven't seen is a verified Twitter account used to torture poor souls.

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>Have you ever played an online game or seen a 40 minute old throwaway account used to attack someone? Fake email addresses to send hate mail.

Not sure how forcing a legal name is involved with online games, but the others can be solved by simply ignoring the troll.

> Twilio numbers used to call and harass people.

And if this creeps into legal harassment, I'm sure the person receiving the calls can work with Twilio and law enforcement.

> If someone feels like they can deliver abuse anonymously then they're certainly more likely to do so.

This is a conclusion provided without evidence. I can easily send someone a bunch of anonymous hate mail using a number of services, but I don't.

> What I bet you haven't seen is a verified Twitter account used to torture poor souls.

I beg your pardon. Ted Cruz has a verified Twitter account, and I find every word he says to be torture.

Okay, simply ignore the troll. But that isn't what you asked. You wanted to know if "using a "fake" name makes you more likely to cause abuse" so are you ignoring the obvious cases where it's true or are you actually asking for someone to post links to PDFs where people did studies on it?

I'm not saying that any ol' individual will be abusive given anonymity. I'm asserting that more abuse happens when people feel they are anonymous. This isn't a novel concept that I just came up with.

>I beg your pardon. Ted Cruz has a verified Twitter account, and I find every word he says to be torture.

Can you at least cite some examples?

When Google Plus was pushing real name rules, a lot of people said "where's the evidence? where's the data driving this decision?" They didn't have any. Google claimed that real names encouraged better social behaviour. This is something people commonly assume about real-name policies — but no-one, including Google, has ever supplied actual evidence of this, rather than personal feeling and assertion.

In fact, what evidence there is points the opposite way: South Korea required commenters on sites with over 100,000 users to supply their Resident Registration Number (national identity number), and this reduced malicious comments by ... 0.9%. http://english.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2011/12/30/2011...

So the evidence is against the claim. If you have good evidence for the claim, you'll be the first.

This is not evidence - numbers. Do you have numbers?

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