Should anonymity be denied on the internet to avoid abuse?

[Phrozenflame500]

I doubt it will change that much.

Names become meaningless with so many of them, and really it will just make it easier for abusers to obtain personal information and attack en-masse.

And anyways, it's really easy to determine where and who you are over the internet if you have the resources (and assuming they aren't using a third-party anonimizer). Personal responsibility is hard due to the sheer number of abusers not because they can't identify them.

 

[geeky_demon]

That would be a little bit too totalitarian, don't you think? It would also mean that introverted people would have nowhere to confidently express themselves anymore thanks to the fear of being judged.

 

[Corran006]

Not unless a crime has been committed. You can always block someone or they may be banned from the website, etc.

 

[Risingblade]

Well it would sure make life easier for stalkers and sexual predators.

 

[MeChaNiZ3D]

No. We have sites where you can be anonymous, sites where you use your real name, and sites where you use a username or pseudonym and that is all you need. Certain discourse, including types of humour, verbal abuse and personal experiences, are only going to come out in an anonymous setting, so you take the good with the bad in my opinion. You don't want your real name used because society hasn't even nearly managed to separate personal and professional lives or incorporate that into their perceptions so saying that you follow a certain religion or that you forgot something on the bus is still going to have connotations to employers. So that's right out, except in a setting where you can control who sees the information. When you use an alias, you build a persona with that alias and to an extent you're not just saying whatever you like, you're playing a role (not true in all cases), especially where content creation is part of your job under that alias.

Basically all three forms serve their purpose and if you talk shit you get hit can't handle the heat step out of the fire don't want to be verbally abused then for God's sakes don't go on /b/ find a polite forum like this one here.

 

[Blow_Pop]

I'll admit I've entertained the thought myself, usually when Youtube's involved. However, there are several reasons why it wouldn't work:

1) I've seen people post the most horrendous comments on various articles and such using their facebook profiles. Not just on facebook itself where they can control the audience, but on all sorts of other, very public sites with facebook plug-ins.

2) As JoJo said, it would make it much easier for people to get really nasty with threats against family etc.

3) There's no way to enforce it. What's to stop people from making fake profiles with vaguely realistic-looking information?

4) Anonymity has its upsides as well as its downsides: some people are more comfortable discussing all sorts of sensitive topics anonymously. For example, someone who's gay but not out to their family can express themselves behind a pseudonym. Someone with a mental illness can talk about it frankly without fear of an unsympathetic employer linking the comments back to them. People can ask questions about embarrassing medical issues they've been having. You're free to vent about people in your life and their behaviour (irritating family, inept colleagues, creepy exes...). The list goes on.

5) Sometimes you just don't want people you know IRL being able to track down your every profile. I don't post anything I'm ashamed of on here, and I'm pretty free with my information, I've linked to stuff with my real name on before now for example, but I'd still be a bit weirded out if one of my RL friends or family realised this was me and started checking out my posting history etc. I've abandoned forums before because I realised other people from my college were on there and I didn't want them to identify me, again not because I'd done anything wrong or embarrassing, but just because I didn't want to mix those aspects of my life. It's kind of like not wanting relatives as facebook friends (all mine are blocked) - sometimes you just want to keep different parts of your life separate.

I'm going to second all of this and add in, already (even though it IS illegal in California) employers tend to look up information on the internet about potential employees to make the decision and taking away the anonymity would enable them to sit there and further go "oh this person is a member of this forum/site, I don't want them hired at my company". Yeah, I have some of my personal information on the internet, but if you search my name depending on how you search, you get possibly my myspace page and youtube page neither of which gives you much info on me unless you listen to my youtube channel personal ish videos and a bunch of shit on the vampire diaries characters (as one of the main characters has the same middle and last name as me). I LIKE being virtually invisible online because I DON'T want employers trying to justify that my personal life is going to be my work life as they are two separate parts of me. I don't take personal problems to work(unless someone's died) and I don't take work problems home. My religion and personal views don't influence me at work. My ethics however are something that are a constant between work and personal. I REFUSE to do something that I find ethically wrong (like sleeping with someone just to get a job). But yeah.

This sums up another portion of my feelings about it.

Getting rid of anonymity to stop online abuse is like trimming the branches if you've got overgrowth. It's a knee jerk reaction that isn't at all addressing the real issue. Punishment and accountability are definitely important, but so is prevention and education. Now, you're obviously not going to weed out racism and sexism that easily, but making kids aware that what they are doing is wrong, damaging, and unnecessary is going to be way more effective than stripping anonymity.

Having said that, if some institution like Reddit or The Escapist or whatever forced users to use their real details then that's totally up to them. Maybe it would stop people being shitheads, but I'm sure they'll find another way to be shitheads.

Stopping people from becoming shitheads in the first place is going to be more effective.

But then again, I have weird viewpoints on things.

 

[Tamayo]

No, no, no.

Just because some people abuse their privacy does not mean that all of us must be denied it. Indeed, it's next to impossible to enforce prior restraint on the Internet, simply because it is [em]an[/em] internet and ....

The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.

That's not just a hippie claim; that's an observation of real behaviour. The Great Firewall of China can work because there are only seven physical hard links for data to enter China and because the Chinese authorities will shoot you if they discover you using a satellite uplink; if you want to abolish privacy, you will have to put in similar safeguards---and if you do, there are lots of people who will find that objectionable, not just hippies like Gilmore and me.

Furthermore, there are lots of easy ways to avoid such safeguards. If we really, really want to communicate securely and anonymously, we can use Tor and GnuPG; they're free, both as in speech and as in beer. We won't be able to play multi-player twitch video games on them, because they use lots of CPU time and because evil censors can detect secure transmissions even if they can't decode them.

Someone must have said something to you anonymously that offended you. Well, too bad. Ann Coulter, Jerry Springer and James Redfield have said things (granted, publically) that offend me, but I will [em]defend[/em] their right to say such awful things, with or without their names attached.

 

[mistahzig1]

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

So now we'd have an army of anonymous ppl lurking/creeping/stalking people who write down words on the Internet?

Kinda creates more problems than it solves IMO

 

[The White Hunter]

No.

Because then Tizzy would be able to find me.

And nobody wants Tizzy to find them.

Damn cat bastard.

 

[s3cur1tr0n]

Just think though how awesome all the popups and other ads would be on the internet. If you think targeted ads are intrusive now wait until you getting popups calling you by name trying to sell you penis enlargement pills or something of that sort. "Hey Bill we have got something to make that tiny wang of yours a real wife pleaser!"

 

[Izanagi009_v1legacy]

Any forum which did that, I would leave and never come back. Last thing you need is some dumb rant or opinion that you in retrospect regret being dragged up five years down the line by an employer doing a background check, or a family member randomly searching your name. This sort of forum allows people to express opinions outside the social norm without fear of real life repercussions, and that can only be a good thing, there's no reason to believe our society's particular norms and morals are inherently superior to all others before it.

And that's the double edged sword of anonymity: it gives people the right to free speech for good or ill.

I would certainly argue that I have thought of a system like that: that if a person wishes to use the internet they would have to "dive" into it so that anything they do is not an avatar but a digitized version of themselves (see how ghost in the shell does network searching and computer interfaces). It would ultimately lead to the determent of free speech though so it may be best to leave anonymity alone while addressing the bigger issues of lack of education and general stupidity in society