It’s complicated, multiple arguments will be made. If it’s an outright ban, users have already claimed their free speech will be infringed upon.
Does anyone think a USian company would not data mine TikTok users just as extensively as Byte Dance does? Does anyone think a USian company would not use that data for malignant purposes?
Is the real issue here that a USian company is not making money off TikTok, so the government is being used to eliminate competition?
Steve
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No. There are crazy people in the world and probably a higher proportion of them are online. It is not worth the aggravation. But then, in exchange for my anonymity, I have no problems with TMF applying whatever standards they deem necessary to moderate or censor what I say. That’s the trade-off.
As a scientist I publish all the time. I have also written editorial pieces. If I put something out into the public domain and with my name on it, I put a lot of time into thinking about what I am going to say. I consider all the consequences.
I don’t think that is a bad thing. I see it as exercising free speech responsibly.
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All of our names/addresses are available to the publisher of this web site.
That should be good enough.
If we say anything illegal or even particularly abhorrent, litigation can sue for that information.
So, we’re not really private anyway.
The problem begins when social media itself doesn’t know who is posting. Perhaps that is an area for congress to explore what restrictions should apply.
Joining a platform should (and usually does) require identifying yourself. Individual posts don’t need that metadata exposed.
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Not so
The Fairness Doctrine
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Sure. My name is Juan Fulanito. I live at 69 Nunya Ln., Ding Dong, TX 76542.
Seriously, who would do that? I know that law enforcement could find me if I did or said something super sketchy. In addition to my general conformance to common decency, that’s enough to keep me in check.
Not everyone can be tracked though. There are bad people saying and doing bad things online who fly under the radar. It’s up to us to protect ourselves and others when we see this happening.
I just checked. On the original Fool, *(well, not the AOL Fool, the web Fool 1.0) I had my name on my profile page, I frequently talk about the city where I live, my business background. It would have been trivial for anyone to find me.
Taking a quick look here I see that information has not migrated over, perhaps I’ll add it if there’s a place for it. I would vastly prefer a social media platform where people are actually identified, it would keep out much of the riff raff.
OTOH I am aware there are circumstances where that would not be advisable: medical questions, battered women, etc. so I have no answer about how to handle those, but in general I find people are more thoughtful and polite when they can’t hide behind their anonymous keyboards and screens. Nearly always, that’s a good thing.
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Thanks for the reply. I respect your sentiment.
So, if I’m understanding you correctly, what website would allow any commentary if they were going to be held accountable for the anonymous postings? I don’t believe anyone would take on that liability.
It’s been my experience that you confront misinformation with the facts. This wasn’t social media, but I managed a plant with 141 employees. The gossip and rumor mills were always active, especially when work began to slow down or we had an increase of corporate personnel visiting the plant. I found it was always best to let them know as much as I could. If I had to withhold some information, I would let them know I was with holding it and the reason why it was being withheld.
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Exactly right. We have online speech with no accountability. People can say whatever they want with few constraints for propriety or accuracy. I don’t believe that the Founding Fathers would consider cyberbullying, online harassment, and the actions of social media bots to be protected free speech, yet current laws and the practice of anonymity make it virtually impossible to regulate these activities.
Suppose one of your employees was being paid by a competitor to create discord within your company, would you still limit your response to only providing more info then? Suppose someone was putting nooses on the desks of your black employees or anonymously leaving suggestive sexual innuendos in people’s work spaces? Wouldn’t you do more aggressive interventions and perhaps even start firing people?
This is relevant because that is what is happening in social media. Foreign actors are using American social media to undermine American institutions. Disturbed individuals are harassing and intimidating other online users. They can do so with virtual impunity because they are protect by (1) the cloak of anonymity and (2) the distributors of their “speech” are protected from liability.
The study, published in the journal Nature Communications, analyzed 14 million messages and 400,000 articles shared on Twitter between May 2016 and March 2017 – a period that spans the end of the 2016 presidential primaries and the presidential inauguration on Jan. 20, 2017. Among the findings: A mere 6 percent of Twitter accounts that the study identified as bots were enough to spread 31 percent of the low-credibility information on the network. These accounts were also responsible for 34 percent of all articles shared from low-credibility sources. The study also found that bots played a major role promoting low-credibility content in the first few moments before a story goes viral. We also identified other tactics for spreading misinformation with Twitter bots. These included amplifying a single tweet – potentially controlled by a human operator – across hundreds of automated retweets; repeating links in recurring posts; and targeting highly influential accounts. Observatory on Social Media: Twitter bots spread misinformation
When so much of the “speech” occurring on social media is being generated by nonhuman bots, the notion of protected free speech becomes highly compromised.
Social media is broken. Eliminating anonymity will go a long way toward fixing it.
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Back to the original issue: TikTok…
The easiest way to deal with it other than an outright ban would be to pass a law which says:
Social media apps will be allowed so long as they are not owned in whole or in part by any government entity, and that US companies have access to countries where those apps are domiciled.
End of issue.
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iirc, Byte Dance insists it is not controlled by the CCP. As for requiring reciprocal access, it isn’t that simple.
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Cory Doctorow begs to differ:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/04/greater-corporate-fuckward-theory/#counterintuit-ive
TL;DR: Doctorow notes that one of the largest social media companies on earth that requires real names - Facebook - is also a horrible, terrible place. Money quote:
Facebook is, famously, one of the internet’s most polluted reservoirs of toxic interpersonal conduct. That’s not despite the fact that people have to use their “real” names to participate there, but because of it. After all, the people who are most vulnerable to bullying and harassment are the ones who choose pseudonyms or anonymity so that they can speak freely. Forcing people to use their “real names” means that the most powerful bullies speak with impunity, and their victims are faced with the choice of retreat or being targeted offline.
This can be a matter of life and death. Cambodian dictator Hun Sen uses Facebook’s real names policy to force dissidents to unmask themselves, which exposes them to arbitrary detention, torture, and extrajudicial killing.
One reason that disclosure isn’t a panacea is that there are multiple reasons why people act differently online than they would in real life. An early article identified six factors causing what the author labeled the Online Disinhibition Effect, of which anonymity is only one:
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And trying to pass a law to prevent TikTok data mining users would be DOA, because the USian companies data mine users ruthlessly.
Steve
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Thanks for sharing, one factor not mentioned in the article relates to how we’re being warped by social media companies and their blasted algorithms.
As one gets older one realizes there are very few panaceas in life. The question is whether eliminating anonymity will significantly improve things. I think it will by making one segment of the abusive internet (those who hide behind their anonymity) more self-conscious about their behavior. I suspect that is a pretty large segment.
Sure, it may help Cambodian dictators, but I’m not sure it is productive to make general rules based on the behavior of dictators, which seems like a pretty specialized demographic.
I agree that this is a problem. On the other hand, I also believe that those most vulnerable to bullying and harassment should probably avoid the internet if they can. The likelihood that someone is going to get worthwhile counseling on X or Facebook about their gender identity issues seems pretty small to me. It is like a recovering alcoholic going to a frat party. Many things might happen and most are probably not going to be good.
It comes down to this. There is not much one can do about the sociopaths out there. If sites are going to allow sociopaths and other bad actors in without moderation, then there will be problems. But for those many who care about their social and business self-image, then losing anonymity significantly moderates behavior. Most people don’t want their friends, colleagues, and customers to know that they are rabid racists or online bullies. It might have consequences…
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First off, I agree that anonymity would reduce some of the problems on social media.
I did have employees that occasionally try to create discord. It was a small town and whenever a new industry arrived nearby it was always how great the new place was going to be. A few would leave but they almost always returned after a few months.
Race relations. Oh yeah. I had a few employees that were extreme bigots. The stupid ones were easy to get rid of. The sly ones were good at covering their actions. It took time to finally fire them, but fire them I did.
Sexual harassment? Yup. Fired them too. And it wasn’t always the males.
The difference between what I experienced and what a social media company would have to monitor is that I knew my employees. I knew their personalities and their character. When there was a problem brewing, I usually knew who was behind it.
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And, of course, there is no actual verification of the name supplied.
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You’d think it would moderate behavior, and certainly at the margins…but not as much as you’d think.
For a personal anecdote, my wife’s family was riven by horrible behavior on Facebook…among themselves. Various family members would write the most terrible things about other relatives in response to whatever they might write about politics or current events or what have you. Things they would never say to the other relative - or even to another person - face to face. Even though they were completely known to the other people.
That’s because social media has a lot more factors that remove your inhibitions than just anonymity. They’re discussed in that psychological article I linked to. If someone’s sitting on a bus and they overhear a stranger make a remark that they strenuously disagree with (“Taylor Swift is not a very good singer”), they’re highly unlikely to say anything. If they see that remark on line, they’re far more likely to respond with something vile and hateful to them.
Part of the reason for the lack of inhibition is anonymity (“You don’t know me.”), to be sure. But there are other factors. One is invisibility (“You can’t see me”) - on the bus, both the target and other bystanders are watching you in that moment. Being actually observed is a huge cue to the brain to moderate your behavior.
Another factor is asychronicity (“You can’t respond now”) - if you say something to a stranger on the bus, you know that they can immediately say something back, which triggers you to be more cautious in what you say. Online, you might not see any response until you choose to - if ever. Nor are you limited to just responding in the moment - you can respond to an online comment minutes or hours or days later or when you’re really ready to get your mad on, so the many many slights and annoyances that would normally just slip by forever are always available for you to lash back at.
One more factor is solipsism - when you’re posting online, you’'re not seeing the person in real time responding to what you’re saying (and you know it) - so your brain doesn’t process your action as a thing you’re doing with or to another human being, but just something you’re doing on your own. There’s also an inherent dissociation that takes place when you don’t have the context to establish that you’re having a human interaction with another person, so it’s easy to mistakenly think of your interaction like it’s a game rather than a social interaction that can seriously upset another person.
All of that stuff makes people act like jerkwads online - even in contexts where their identity is known or knowable. Because all the stuff that normally inhibits you from doing that in real life is absent. Which is what led to one of my wife’s cousins repeatedly calling multiple relatives “socialist See You Next Tuesdays” over the course of the 2020 election cycle, when she would never utter that word to their face (or in public ever). Because social media makes many people awful, even if it’s their own name and picture on the profile.
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Whoa. They sound like a real piece of crap. Come to think of it, anyone who uses that word, no matter the context, is probably a piece of crap.
I’m betting their extreme behavior was also amplified by algorithms feeding them vile content. Algorithms enable nasty behavior.
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