
Cyberbullying expert who wants to strip abusers of anonymity wins “Genius” grant - Kroeler
https://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2019/09/danielle-citron-legal-scholar-cyber-harrassment-gamergate.html
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deogeo
Problems sure are easy to solve when you look at them through a toilet-paper
tube, in isolation from everything else the solution might affect.

If they can be stripped of anonymity, they did not have anonymity in the first
place. But it is telling that she notes "Workers are far less likely to
sexually harass fellow employees", but does not connect it to how workers
might get retaliated against for trying to unionize, when every union advocate
online can be identified. To say nothing of whistle-blowers. Want to publicize
the abusive conditions in a prison? Be prepared to "own your own words" and
expose your relatives incarcerated there to retaliation.

Of course, this solution fails to pass even the toilet-paper tube standard -
what about (potential) harassment victims that use anonymity as a shield? Are
they to trust in the benevolence and competence of whatever multinational
corporation they will hand their real identity to, to be allowed to
participate in the online public sphere? When every month we learn of some new
giant hack, and who knows how many happen that we don't learn about?

I cannot begin to express my disgust for an 'expert genius' that fails to
consider even such elementary consequences.

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weare138
Exactly. And another point of contention I have about this is how? How would
we even do this?

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deogeo
South Korea did it (yes, _South_ Korea)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_South_K...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_South_Korea):

> In 2007, numerous bloggers were censored and their posts deleted by police
> for expressing criticism of, or even support for, presidential candidates.
> This even led to some bloggers being arrested by the police. Subsequently,
> in 2008, just before a new presidential election, new legislation that
> required all major Internet portal sites to require identity verification of
> their users was put into effect.

I think this legislation may have been overturned by their Supreme Court, but
there's shockingly little reporting of this in western media. So of course it
would be too much to ask of an 'expert genius' to be aware of how such things
turn out in practice.

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quickSilver78
The proposal seems like it would do a lot more harm than good. Users who live
in a dictatorship would have one of the biggest channels to tell their story
stripped from them.

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ryacko
Fighting a dictatorship is different than fighting cyberbullies.

Fighting a dictatorship is just a matter of making the public lies so absurd
that support is lost for their propaganda.

Cyberbullies only use believable common lies and rumor.

~~~
quickSilver78
Umm... that statement has nothing to do with what I said.

Taking away anonymity from platforms always governments to target any
individual that steps out of line.

