

Twitter has a fundamental problem Facebook solved years ago - nols
http://www.businessinsider.com/statistics-on-twitter-abuse-rape-death-threats-and-trolls-2015-4

======
aestetix
Another round of this crap.

You know who loses when a "real" names policy is enforced? Native Americans,
domestic abuse survivors, anyone who wants to express a political opinion
without risking their job (or in some countries, their life), people asking
intimate questions about sex, and many more.

You know who wins? Data brokers who want to buy your data from Facebook.

Provide me with evidence that using a "fake" name makes you more likely to
cause abuse, and I'll eat these words.

~~~
coderdude
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.

~~~
aestetix
>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.

~~~
coderdude
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?

~~~
davidgerard
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...](http://english.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2011/12/30/2011123001526.html)

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

------
vinceguidry
You can't win on this.

Facebook recently came under fire explicitly for their real name policy.
Actually, they come under fire a lot for this, we just kinda forget about it
until someone new decides to make an issue of it.

Anonymity is very useful to a certain kind of person, those whom individuals,
call them criminals, are motivated to attack. But bullies themselves will use
the tools of anonymity to ply their trade with impunity.

You can't have it both ways. If you need anonymity, your only recourse is to
stay off of Facebook. Plenty of people have tried to keep their anonymity on
Facebook, only to get outed by their huge data engine.

I would love to be able to find a happy medium, but at present it doesn't look
like there is one. There's some hope that pseudonymity can give people the
best of both worlds, but unfortunately does not protect against bullies.

The difference I can see is that bullies are unmotivated negative users, that
simply need dissuasion from doing what they would otherwise do naturally,
whereas the people that truly need anonymity need protection against motivated
negative users, criminals, who will find a way to attack the person they want
to attack regardless of policy. I can't imagine a policy that can usefully
protect against both types of bad actors. Maybe there is one, I dunno. But
vilifying the social networks themselves is definitely not the solution. We
don't have any idea what they should be doing, so it's unhelpful to lump more
hatred onto them.

~~~
zimbatm
I don't think that Facebook asks for real names to prevent bullying. It's a
policy to help advertising metrics and create a community rooted in the real
world. Bullying happens regardless of those rules anyways.

The biggest issue with Twitter is that their system doesn't encourage positive
behavior. On HN, Reddit and other forum software value is added to an
anonymous identity over time and with the involvement of it's user. Mechanisms
like votes are in place to provide a feedback to the user. Account ranking and
age gives you credence. It's still possible for users to commit social suicide
but it becomes less likely once the account has been padded with history.
Twitter on the other hand has two metrics: following and followers.

------
halisaurus
Twitter can fix this with an existing feature that has perceived value to the
user base: Open up being a "Verified User" to anyone who uses a real name (or
otherwise proves a real identity). Then, allow all users to filter
notifications/replies/viewable tweets by whether or not someone is verified.
It doesn't remove the option to be anonymous, but others can limit their
interaction with anons if they choose. (They could even charge for
verification I suppose.)

I'm sure plenty of "regular" people (i.e. non-celebrities) would verify
themselves for the blue check mark. To date it's been reserved for select
users and gained a value on Twitter. They could capitalize on that here very
easily.

E: typo.

~~~
mikeash
I imagine they would want separate tiers to deal with collisions. "Yes this is
my name" is different from "yes I am that well known person." In short, you'd
still want to distinguish between a famous no-talent ass-clown and a random
office worker of the same name.

(And I'll admit it, I mainly posted this comment so I could make the _Office
Space_ joke.)

------
whoopdedo
Does that 88% statistic normalize for amount of traffic? There may be more
mean things said on Twitter, but doesn't a tweet also generate more comments
than a Facebook post?

From the cited Kick It Out study:

    
    
        As Facebook has the highest number of gated profiles, the amount of authors
        tracked from that network is significantly lower than Twitter.
    

So they're comparing oranges with apple pie.

I almost wonder if there's some stealth advertising here in that "Twitter is
88% better than Facebook at giving your product social media exposure."

Also, when did "troll" come to mean saying something negative? It used to be
for people intentionally starting arguments for the sake of being
argumentative. But now it's become a generic way to nullify an opinion you
don't like by saying "you're a troll" to anyone who disagrees with you.

~~~
saurik
I would be highly surprised if Twitter posts got more comments. I have had
tweets of mine "trending" in the past, and I would estimate (based on how
quickly and how often on those days I'd burn through the 800 recent mention
window; I have more exact stats, but I just want an estimate here) I was
getting mere thousands of responses. I routinely see Facebook posts with
thousands of comments. Essentially every single post to the Stargate Universe
has thousands of comments. On Facebook, comments matter: you aren't just
mumbling into the void. Facebook surfaces comments of high value so that
people viewing the post see them, and makes certain that people you are sort
of connected with see your comments. On Twitter, your responses are only seen
by people who follow _both_ you _and_ the account to which you are responding,
making it so effectively no one ever sees what you said. This means that
Facebook comments are first off more interesting to post as a commenter, and
secondly more "viral" and can lead more people to your brand. You also, and
this to me is the killer issue with this statistic, are able to moderate
comments on Facebook: the only place where a person is able to say things is a
post on their own timeline; comments that are horrible are under the control
of someone who is unlikely to be, at least in that moment, equally horrible,
and who are incentivized to make their content not look horrible.

------
krschultz
I think one of the basic optimizations that Twitter could implement would be
to implement opt-in real identity and filtering.

I use my real name on twitter. I also use my real face. If I could check a box
that basically said 'filter out anyone not doing the same', Twitter would be a
much kinder place from my perspective.

If not that, I would even take a filter that cut out all accounts less than a
certain age (not user age, I'm talking about account creation date). Most of
the trolls are on brand new accounts that are a few hours/days old, and have
few followers.

"Don't feed the trolls" puts the onus on the victim to constrain their
reactions after being trolled. But "don't give the trolls any attention" is
very workable. If I don't hear/see the trolls, then they may as well not
exist. I think knowing that you are not actually trolling anyone will reduce a
lot of the trolling.

~~~
zimbatm
Real name is a simplification. It assumes that users are less likely to
misbehave because they can't change their identity. This is also true for
other systems where users can invest value into their accounts but still have
the option of anonymity. HN is an example of those.

Also, bullies tend to be bullies regardless of the rules.

------
hellbanTHIS
>The answer is "real identity."

Oh boy here we go. Anybody who's ever followed a Drudge link to a news site
that uses Facebook comments knows that isn't true.

The Internet is inherently toxic. Right now we're all like Marie Curie
fascinated by this glowing thing we found but eventually we'll figure out that
although you can do amazing things with it prolonged exposure will kill you.

~~~
makomk
Some people have enough influence that they can often pressure employers into
sacking people who say offensive things. For them, real names are a huge
benefit because they know who to try and get sacked. It's not so much of a win
for anyone who doesn't have that kind of power, but fortunately no-one listens
to their views anyway. Basically, there's a kind of structural problem where
the "solutions" that get the most press are the ones that benefit the
powerful, because they're the people driving the discussion.

------
mandeepj
I think the reason why this "fundamental problem" is existing on one social
network and white not on other lies on how these two apps are structured.

On facebook, there are two modes of creating your presence - personal page and
business page. You have choice to approve or reject new friend request or kick
an existing friend if s\he is causing any trouble. I don't have official data
about trolls on business pages but I am sure it exists there.

Contrary to this, on twitter anyone can start following you and wage a war
against you. You can unfollow your followers but how many you will do?

To avoid any harassment on twitter either users can share their tweets only
with their particular lists or have a moderation on who is following them.

------
toast0
As someone with a common name, I don't really see how real names help. Is it
me, or the guy who lives about 15 houses away with the same name (seriously,
although I don't know him, he shows up on the people sites), or the famous
author.

I could be an asshole online with my real name and have no problems. I learned
early however that if you cause the right amount of trouble, the internet
connection is turned off.

------
hkmurakami
They attribute the stagnant user growth to an anymore users, yet how much
would their user base outright shrink if they went real ID only a la Google+?

As a correlary, now that they are public, which is more important to Twitter:
user growth metrics or growth in meaningful engagement on the platform?

------
RexRollman
The title is misleading because Facebook hasn't solved anything, unless you
felt the world was missing a self-surveillance system.

------
A_COMPUTER
there is a big problem with harassment on Twitter, but this is capitulation to
only one aggrieved group. At least twice Rickey Gervais has tweeted pictures
of young women hunters next to their game that has resulted in widespread
death threats and harassment of the women. During the Suey Park #CancelColbert
thing, I watched as one of her friends systematically told everybody replying
to her to "die in a fire", "drink bleach", "kill yourself", and then when
someone said the same thing to Park, Park declared she was getting death
threats.

This is just going to be another system abused to shut one group of people up
while another group does the same shit with impunity. The evidence is all
there. Just recently I saw an argument about this on "The Mary Sue" where one
person demanded proof that the other side of an Internet flame war was also
getting death threats. When it was proven, the person declared that because
the death threats against these people were not the result of oppression, they
mattered less, and talking about them was "derailing the discussion." This is
about ideology, not about a general concern for human safety. Some people
being harassed don't count.

------
marvel_boy
"[...]88% of trolls are on Twitter."

And this is the reason of stalled growing of the platform. Anom users is a
recipe for disaster.

~~~
wiml
"Anom users is a recipe for disaster", says someone known only as
"marvel_boy".

I've always been pretty skeptical of the "anonymity causes bad behavior, non-
anonymity causes good behavior" theory, especially since the supporting
argument usually consists only of a link to a Penny Arcade comic. Certainly
some of the best and most humane communities I've been part of have been
largely anonymous or pseudonymous, and some of the most vitriolically toxic
have been tied to peoples' other (persistent and supposedly "realer")
identities.

~~~
amagumori
anonymous communities tend towards being a cesspool after they reach a certain
size. small anonymous communities are often great

~~~
walterbell
depends on moderation algo, see HN

~~~
amagumori
true enough. *unmoderated communities of a certain size

------
michaelpinto
mostly anon user base + limited space to communicate = flaming

