The topic of anonymity — and banning it — bubbles to the top of Twitter once every few months, with varying degrees of prominence.
Advocates want a requirement that everyone on social media must use the service under their real identities — reasoning that the prospect of real-world consequences will stop toxic people engaging in abuse and harassment, while also eliminating the tide of bots and sockpuppet accounts.
Leaving aside (for a moment) that banning anonymity online is so impractical as to be essentially impossible — removing anonymity would not solve the problems of social media; in fact, it would make them worse.
Privacy Is A Human Right
There are very good reasons why individuals may have legitimate need to be anonymous — including, but by no means limited to:
- Citizens of oppressive regimes
- Journalists, activists, whistleblowers, those in witness protection, and other voices the powerful might wish to silence
- Survivors of sexual assault, domestic abuse, or stalking seeking a life free from their abusers (and fear thereof)
- Those who might otherwise be targeted with abuse/harassment for reasons of (to name just a few) race, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability
People don’t need a reason — and should never be required to provide one — for wanting anonymity. Taking away such privacy opens the way for more abuse and harassment — including doxxing and identity theft.
And let’s not forget that many toxic accounts already use their real names with impunity, because the rules on existing social networks are inadequate in both scope and enforcement. So there’s little merit to the idea that toxicity would vanish in a non-anonymous environment.
What Would It Take To Verify Everyone?
Facebook has 2.8 Billion active accounts, and Twitter has 330 million, of which 354k (0.10%) are verified. If it takes 5 minutes to verify one account, 100 thousand people could not verify everyone if they had an entire year to do it — and that’s not including the new users who join in that time, or lapsed users who reactivate their accounts.
There is no automated solution here because there is no international database of identities for everyone on the planet. While some countries have individual solutions, most do not — predominantly those in the developing world. And do we really trust governments that run propaganda networks of fake accounts to provide accurate data?
For the most part, services that currently use identity checks to screen their customers are selling something. They can directly offset the cost of verification against a sale. A social network operates entirely differently, meaning they would have to swallow the cost of verification up front.
You may think it only fair that Facebook be forced to pay to fix these problems (and they should) but — in practice — Facebook will just implement the cheapest possible solution while its competitors are all bankrupted trying to do the same.
Then there’s the fact that not everyone has access to identity documents. Getting a passport or driver’s licence costs money — so this route disproportionately punishes the poor. Not everyone has a birth certificate and many trans/non-binary people live under governments that restrict or prohibit them from updating that document with their true identity. Having a utility bill in your name requires you to be the account holder — something not the case for many young people, renters, and spouses/partners (overwhelmingly women).
Then there’s the problem of fake IDs. Faking a passport or driver’s license isn’t simple, but faking a photo of one is more trivial than you might think. A quick google search reveals any number of templates — and this is before we’ve created a massive market for such fakes by banning anonymity.
And what about human error? Unless someone builds some sort of miracle AI verification engine (without existing problems, such as racism, and sexism) there needs to be a human somewhere making the final decision. Human error has already seen Twitter wrongly verify accounts when there isn’t a huge demand on that service.
Then — even assuming this could all be paid for, built, and applied (which, again, it can’t) — do we really want to put the most powerful set of personal data ever collected in the hands of the very people with the worst record of abusing that data?
A Solution to the Wrong Problem
So — in summary — banning anonymity is an unworkable measure that will harm countless innocent people (disproportionately members of marginalised communities) while solving none of the problems for which it is presented as a solution.
Those calling for bans on anonymity tend to be those with a public profile large enough to make anonymity impossible. When they decry anonymity, they’re not thinking about those with legitimate need of privacy — they’re thinking about the minority who abuse that right.
For such abusers, anonymity is foremost employed to evade previous social media bans. It allows them to repeatedly create new, abusive accounts — knowing that the social network will belatedly ban them (again), but also knowing that they can (again) just create a new account.
Anonymity is not the problem here — disposability is.
A Real Solution
Now we know the real problem, we can create real solutions.
Solution 1: Content Moderation
Firstly, social networks must better protect their users. A much-broader ruleset must be enforced fairly, consistently, and rapidly. When people behave in ways that are harmful to others, their platform must be curtailed so the rest of the community can speak without fear.
Solution 2: Measures Of Trust
Secondly, there must be measures to help members of the community manage their own engagement. Users’ historic behaviour — positive, negative, or benign — should contribute to transparent measures of trust and affinity.
Solution 3: Earned Permissions
Finally, influence must be earned. The right to engage with both large and wide audiences should be dependent upon good conduct, demonstrated over time. When someone contributes responsibly, their influence should increase; when someone contributes with toxicity, their influence must decrease proportionately.
Taken together, these factors ensure that all anonymous accounts still require personal investment. This cultivation of online identities imbues them with an inherent value — one guaranteed to be put at risk by engaging in toxic behaviour
In this way, anonymous accounts can still thrive — but disposable accounts cannot.
You can learn more about how Podium is already building these solutions on our website and other design blogs.
You can help us on our mission to #SaveSocialMedia by following us on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn.
