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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 1st, 2023

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  • Fifteen to 20 years ago many people thought that the anonymity of the internet provided a permission structure for people to act incivilly. But if anything, the rise of social media has disproven that. People post the most incredibly toxic shit on Facebook or Twitter, often under their own names, right now. It’s not the relative anonymity, or lack thereof, that dissuades people from toxic behavior. It’s a collective action problem that rewards whatever the community (however defined) doesn’t rise up to stamp out.

    Require a real ID (which sounds vaguely Orwellian where it doesn’t sound nebulous) and you’ll still get Ben Shapiro and Steven Crowder and your uncle yelling transphobic trash on Twitter and Facebook and elsewhere. Places like Reddit and the fediverse are rapidly becoming outliers.

    And as pointed out in OP, requiring all accounts tied to an identifiable person would be a disaster for people in abusive relationships, or who have a stalker, or other endangered persons. (Thinking back to Google Buzz and the ways it enabled online harassment and abuse before Google mercifully cut it showrt.)

    The current, semi-anonymous, system is possibly the worst system devised, with the possible exception of all the others. No system is going to solve a collective-action problem. We, the collective, have to step up and fix it ourself.

    (My understanding of Web 3.0 is limited to the crypto space, which seems inherently scammy; if there’s more to it than that, and I should be aware of it, I’d love to be educated.)


  • Lots to chew over in this piece. My knee-jerk reaction is to be opposed to any efforts to legislate against thoughtcrime, but I’m not insensitive to the effect deepfakes can have on the women targeted. Yet even saying “legislate” in the previous sentence isn’t quite right (nobody’s suggesting consumers of deepfakes should be prosecuted and imprisoned); what the article seems to suggest is a societal shift in approval vs. disapproval of one’s imagination — which is still alarming at a high level, but less so.

    I also wonder if focusing on deepfakes as a unique problem isn’t a category error; AI is making all manner of false scenarios appear photorealistic, with ramifications society-wide. Maybe we need to confront the usage of this technology in general? IDK.