Paul Carr versus the Internet Anonymity

Sir John Gilbert, A sketch on a card, January 15th, 1878

As a follow up to the article I just posted, Paul Carr wires another post with a real proposal to tackle anonymity on the internet. Here is the meat of the proposal and the prediction. The Telegraph – Internet anonymity: your questions answered, and a modest proposal:

“Which brings me to the most common quibble posted in response to my Schopenhauer passage: that without anonymity we wouldn’t have Alexander Pope, or the American Constitution, or the Watergate story. Anonymity, many argued, has a rich and noble history of allowing people to speak out against injustice and tyranny.

Indeed.

But there are two huge differences with anonymity in history and anonymity 2.0. First of all, likening Internet commenters to the founding fathers or Deep Throat is ludicrous to the point of parody. Any moron with fingers and an Internet connection can publish a comment online. In fact, had the majority of internet commenters been responsible for drafting the constitution, it’s probable that the first amendment would simply be the word “first!!1!!” and the second amendment would be an advert for a porn site.

Secondly, and more importantly, in the past anonymous authors and critics still required indentifiable editors and distributors to get their words heard.Deep Throat was anonymous, and as a result he needed Bob Woodward – an identifiable journalist – and the Washington Post – a trusted and identifiable newspaper – to act as his mouthpiece. The responsibility for verifying the information provided fell on these identifiable bodies and, as such, readers could trust that they weren’t being lied to. The same is true with almost all anonymous authors of old – they needed the services of identifiable publishers and distributors who could be sued if the work was shown to be libellous or untrue.

The ability for an anonymous writer to distribute his work without exposing himself to independent verification was limited at best. Perhaps to a few copies passed around a coffee house. Today, that has changed. An anonymous blogger or commenter can write what he likes about whoever he likes, and thanks to Google, his words can instantly be found read around the world. British law holds Internet publishers liable for such comments (once their attention has been drawn to them) but no such law exists in America or much of the rest of the world. The law, and the technology, favours the trolls over the truth – something which was simply not the case for the Constitution, Watergate or Pope.

One final question on the subject of banning anonymity was posed by my esteemed colleague, Andrew Keen. Andrew agrees with my hatred on anonymous trolls, he says, but wonders what can be done to punish offenders. His modest proposal can be found here. In reality, though, the law already provides perfectly adequate punishments for identifiable defamers. The only problem is in identifying them.

There’s only one absolutely foolproof way to verify identity online and that’s for an independent verification body to be created by either a government agency or a credit card company. That body would use pre-existing records to match online identity to real world identify, ensuring that we are all who we say we are. Unfortunately, trust issues aside, a government-backed scheme would only work on a country by country basis – rendering it useless for such a global medium – and one from Visa or Mastercard would mean that only people with those credit cards could comment online. Hardly democratic.

So a 100% solution is out of the question. But a huge leap towards outlawing anonymous cowards can be made simply by blog owners rewarding those who identify themselves, and penalising those who don’t. Both Facebook and Twitter already make it simple for blog owners to allow users to comment using their account credentials on those social networks. In the majority of cases, this will be sufficient to discourage anonymity – both Facebook and Twitter actively discourage the use of fake names, with the former actually deleting users who break their ‘real name’ rule. Also, it’s a simple matter of clicking through to a commenter’s Twitter or Facebook profile to see if they pass a smell test: the more friends or followers they have, the more likely they are to be genuine. Equally the more friends their friends have… and so on.

And it’s here that we get into what could be the real solution to anonymous comments: trust algorithms. It’s only a matter of time before someone develops a simple blog plugin that allows a Facebook or Twitter login to be used to comment on a blog, and then uses information like number of followers, and number of posts posted on other blogs, to calculate the likelihood that a commenter is genuine. Comments that pass this digital smell test can be posted almost immediately, while others will be referred for manual moderation. And of course, the results of this moderation can then be fed into the trust algorithm.

Sure, it’s still not fool proof, but if it’s even 75% effective in discouraging all but the most determined of trolls it will make the Internet a massively better place overnight.

In the meantime, there are already signs that major blog owners are realising that anonymous trolls pose the biggest anti-social influence since spam, and are prepared to shun comment quantity in favour of quality. At dinner the other evening, a few of us who write for TechCrunch petitioned Michael Arrington to try – for just a month – forcing users to login using their Facebook or Twitter identity if they wished to comment. He mulled it over for at least two courses before grudgingly agreeing.

I have no idea when it will happen – or which technology the administrators at Techcrunch HQ will use to manage it – but the very fact that a site the size of TechCrunch is considering forcing commenters to use their real identity means that other site owners will inevitably follow suit.

Those of us who truly believe that the Internet is the future of free speech can only hope that the trial is a success. And that what starts as a trial soon becomes standard procedure for every comment posted on every blog. After all, nothing less than the very survival of the Internet depends on it.”