There's a movement afoot to try to get Facebook to end its (theoretical) policy of not allowing pseudonyms and even to have the FB devs put in a special "activist's" account to protect people like Google engineer Wael Ghonim, who was expelled from Facebook when the managers found he was using a pseudonym. Not long after, he was kidnapped and tormented for 12 days before being released to emerge as one of the public leaders of the Egyptian revolution.
Facebook has come under pressure from activists and even Sen. Richard Durbin to provide this service of "cover" for democracy movements abroad. It's ill-advised, because the same cover that would be provided to legitimate democracy promoters could also be provided to cynical anarchists such as Anonymous DDOS attackers of companies -- and there is no legitimate way to know the difference -- and there shouldn't be. People one-sidedly portraying the issue of pseudonymity on the Internet are wilfully neglecting to tell the other side about bullying, stalking, copyright theft, privacy exposure, crashing of servers, child pornography, and other crimes. These aren't trivial issues whatsoever.
Yes, you want people like Wael to have the ability to take a pseudonym online to be able to blog or report or organize without being exposed to predatory authoritarian governments. We get all that. As a human rights activist and journalist, of course I value and respect the right and ability of people to take pen names and nicknames to protect themselves. But this is not a feature that geeks and activists of various stripes -- including the anonymous Wikileaks and their e-thug friends in Anonymous the looseknit movement of hackers -- should be dictating to platforms now. It's no accident that suddenly, when hordes of script kiddies are attacking companies with DDOS attacks with impunity over WikiLeaks criticism or refusal to service WikiLeaks, a group of concerted lefty hacktivists at the Berkman Center have come up with this campaign and pinned it to a figure like Wael Ghonim, the Google engineer.
But, no, we don't need more unaccountable and anonymous geeks on the Internet like Anonymous thugs and their enablers, just for the sake of good people like Ghonim. We do need a mainstream social platform that prizes real-life identity and accountability, and the geeks and the anarchists and the democrats (sometimes all three are the same person) need to go to other platforms if they need anonymity. It's not as if there isn't a choice! If they don't like their little IRC channels and pastebins, I would suggest Google Groups and gmail... (And that's what Wael did when he was kicked from FB).
I speak as someone who has gone to enormous pains to keep my online pseudonyms in virtual communities intact and not connected to my RL name, and has had that privacy ripped from me by malicious stalkers who felt that *I* needed accountability and exposure because...I criticized their hijinx in online worlds, or their tendentious reporting of public events and controversies. The Internet is a nasty, malicious place, and if you don't ever want your privacy ripped, don't go on it. I didn't have any particular "secret" or "embarrassment' of tying my online personas to my RL name, I just didn't like being harassed in my real life at home and at work by the Internet fuckwads. This was a real and frequent occurrence -- one slip of giving someone a RL email (say, to send a photo), or slipping up and logging on to them on your Yahoo Messenger, and oops, you can open yourself up to YEARS of stalking and harassment by these losers.
I've been forced to link my RL and SL identities for two reasons -- one, so that stalkers don't feel they "have something on me" and can't try to blackmail me, harass me, send me death threats (all of which I've experienced for my critical blog) -- I'm already "outed". And I also link my identities to stand for the right of having an avatar and a pseudonym -- I believe strongly in people's rights to do this, and the Internet gurus like Andrew Keen and John Perry Barlow who denigrate people who are anonymous, and make entire theories about non-anonymous communities as superior, cannot be allowed to bully people who don't wish to comform to their self-interested wishes to avoid criticism (both of them labour under the misperception that if people aren't anonymous, they won't criticize them; I hope I've handily laid that myth to rest : ) )
I believe in people's rights to make separate channels for things they do online, and that's a good reason to have an avatar -- so that people don't hound and harass you and link your views or activities on that avatar, trying to use it to trip you up, embarrass, expose, harass you in your real life occupation or family. It's a kind of disclaimer that says "the views expressed are my own, and not my employer's" when you have an avatar. In the end, it's a personal choice. You shouldn't have to justify a nickname by the reasons for it, so that only brave Egyptian dissidents get to have privacy and pseudonyms on special "verified activist" accounts (which is what the Berkman's Jillian York is pleading for), but people who merely have an alternative sexual lifestyle on Second Life don't get this privilege of privacy. But I don't believe that any one platform should be forced to provide this feature. It should be voluntary.
IDENTITY IS NOT ENFORCED, BUT ANONYMITY IS REPORTABLE
The first point to make about all this on Facebook is that no, it's not policed and enforced. But those smugly informing us of this obvious truth we all know behave as if they don't know how the California Business Model works. It works by enabling people to sign up as easily as possible with as little checking or friction as possible, to upload and say what EVER they want, and never get in their way (and get in the way of traffic and ad clicking!) unless and until an abuse report is received (and not even then -- that's why sometimes it takes a chorus of them).
If you abuse report an anonymous avatar -- especially one harassing you or impersonating you (as I've had to do) -- eventually it works and they are removed by the company. It can take a year. They are heavily backlogged and don't make this kind of governance customer service a priority. Don't forget this service is free, and not really very profitable, and living off VC cash still. But if there is no abuse report, and no apparent bad behaviour, or no apparent public controversy (as with Wael), the company might leave it alone. It's a discretionary policy. The TOS is unconscionable; it is a contract of adhesion. Facebook is NOT a club with due process.
The compliance is decidedly mixed. I've seen SL avatars be booted, and others last for years. I have them in my friends' groups. It depends on the abuse reports and what they do, I guess. I've seen Russian dissidents and Belarusian dissidents come on with fake or contrived versions of their names, and nothing happens. I've seen my sons' friends do the same thing. But I've also seen FB police it when they want to -- and that means it is not a place for safe anonymous organizing.
Really, no place is, but again, I'm for there being a PLURALITY of these services, with some having service-level agreements for First Amendment enforcement which you as a community manager or even an individual with the bucks to pay for an SLA can get. In a market of such services, there will spring up both expensive and classy SLAs that let people do what they want especially in adult entertainment, and crappy little start-ups that specialize in letting anarchists put up crap and do what they want. And then, for the rest of us, there will be mainstream places like Facebook that pride themselves on moderation in all things, and RL identities.
WHY WE NEED AUTHENTICATION AND REPUTATION SYSTEMS -- AND A CHOICE OF THEM
When Facebook first began to show up everywhere as a sign-on device, I was concerned it might be the *only* one after awhile (and it is, in some places). But I was so much happier with FB than OpenID, the open source alternative which is wonky, crappy, customer-service adverse, and of course, heavily ideological (explained by its condition as an OS project). Open ID seems to have gone away in a lot of places (except Second Life!) and Twitter or FB options are more frequent, or Disqus, which I like because it lets me have a record of all my posts and a tag line about my persona and has a"likes" system. (It should have "dislikes" too).
I'm all for reputational systems you can opt out of -- the problem with insisting on them as some means of civility is that the illiberal geeks running many a platform will ban people they don't like and use reputation systems to bully people with ideas they don't like. So I'm for having systems separate from the platform itself (i.e. separate from the Facebook or Twitter or blog) that have points -- and if you want, you can join it, and if you don't, you don't have to. The main thing is to try to promote an ecology of PLURALISM (something the "progressives" never appreciate) so that we have choice.
I have to chuckle at Steve Gillmore, for example, of the aptly named Gilmore Gang first ranting about Twitter, a proprietary platform, then Facebook and Friendfeed, obsessed with the "social graph" and the "gestures" and who "owned them," finally, when he couldn't get his way with the devs there and get the features he felt belonged in the tools, to tout Diaspora, the OS FB being hustled among the left, and then finally, seeming to drop Diaspora, to tout Chatter.com, which is for companies, and only people with company email. Sigh. So he would get one as a Techcrunch writer, but us freelancers or independent contractors wouldn't get to play. That's the idea!
Real-life identity on Facebook is no guarantee against harassment. Every time I post a critical remark on the WikiLeaks fanpage, I get hate comments, IMs, crap sent to me by the Anonymous -- even with RL-sounding names (they may not be; some are). I have a tag line on my profile that says "Liberal, But Not Progressive" -- and so some asshole writes me, "Liberal but not progressive? Then lose your computer," i.e. get off the Internet. That's how they are, those lovely illiberals lol.
IDENTITY COULD BE AN ENHANCED FEATURE YOU PAY FOR
The Times seemed to be leaning towards boosting the anonymous stuff, even though some of their techs in fact lean in the direction of Andrew Keen. You don't have to have a real-life name to post on the New York Times forums, and I frankly think that makes them a lot more extremist and retarded than they need to be. I wish I could pay a subscription fee to sign on with my Facebook and talk to other people who paid a subscription fee and signed on with Facebook, rather than having 800 idiots with nicks fanning Paul Krugman hysterically and bleating about 911 as an inside job and screeching about the kill switch.
The Huffington Post forums are basically useless because they have so many people, and again, I wish there was at least some section where -- after paying MONEY -- I could be able to have a more filtered and less anonymous experience.
But I'm also for having anonymous comments sections because people should be able to express themselves without being harassed in their real lives, or linking their possibly controversial opinions with RL jobs and such. I just wish we had MORE CHOICE about this -- the ability to be in settings where we don't have to suffer thousands of anonymous assholes who are behaving badly because they are anonymous.
THE ROLE OF PLATFORMS: NEUTRAL SOCIAL SERVICES
In examining this, the Times analyzes whether Facebook also has a role to play in enabling activism. I would say, no, stay out of it. Run the servers, run the features, keep the platform functioning, and stay out of social movements. Keep them fair and neutral, and have opt-in of RL or pseudonymous names as a feature, not a mandate.
Mark Zuckerberg has some very unattractive ideas about how the world should be run and what would make it "better." Unattractive, because they are meglomaniac and cyberutopian -- and have no democratic participation. That's why you can't have him and his notions run this very sensitive issue that affects the lives now of 500 million people.
I've examined his social theories at length on the basis of a rare interview he gave in 2008 in which he expressly described his notion that he believed at the time that Facebook represented "69 million people" (the membership in that year) who were all doing something that he could harness -- to oppose guerillas in Columbia, to do this or that. He talked -- ridiculously, in cyber-utopian mode -- about how men in the Middle East inclined to violence and jihad would become "connected" and "make a friend" on Facebook, and then they'd be less rowdy (!). Forgetting about their guns and religion? This is just brainless twaddle of the sort that comes from people who may know how to code and may now how to make million-dollar Silicon Valley businesses, but know nothing about sociology, civil society, managing communities online fairly, etc.
FB doesn't do a very good job of that. They don't have enough people; the people they have involved in censorship and intervening on governance aren't really qualified for the job -- and it's a job maybe that shouldn't exist -- self-governance by FB customers would be better, with ombudsmen at the company. (The problem with that notion is that it would devolve to geek-run clans that control online associations we know all too well, like the old Second Life Mentors in the Welcome Areas who filtered and funneled and controlled people and the experience, undemocratically and abusively, flogging their own stores, etc. Even so, I live in hope that such systems can still be devised.)
MISGUIDED NOTIONS OF SEN. DURBIN
Sen. Durbin has rushed into this dispute, and I'm not sure why, or who scripted it for him. He cares about human rights, he has a long and impressive track record on human rights issues I'm very familiar with, but he fell into this because he didn't have enough information about the whole issue from all sides.
I think he should have stuck to one narrow issue: asking American companies not to turn over the private data of customers in any form to abusive foreign governments, but stayed off the issue of pseudonymity which was dictated to him by extremist geeks with an agenda. Asking American companies to uphold American ideals not to rat out and turn people into the secret police is a good thing, and the sort of morality that one hopes government leadership can play a role in without legislating it, but ultimately, it's about the market. If people find Yahoo pretty craven to the Chinese, they can stop using its search and go to Google, which was also once craven and became less so. We need CHOICES.
CONGRESS SHALL MAKE NO LAW...
Senators, God bless them, even if elected, should not be using their perch to force speech on private companies. I'm all for Congress debating this and I'm glad Sen. Durbin is passionate about this -- we need lots more senators to care about our lives online and how unfair, unjust, and exploited they are -- but we don't need them to force speech codes or speech restrictions. Forcing a company to allow pseudonyms is forcing speech. "Congress shall make no law..." This is not only a First Amendment violation that would not stand up in court; it's a violation of freedom of association that would not stand up in court.
BERKMANITES AT IT AGAIN?
I wonder if this is a Berkmanite special -- or who exactly lobbied Sen. Durbin to get this "special treatment" for anonymous activists. They should be open about what they are doing -- trying to hijack social media policy in this fashion. When Sen. Lieberman asked rightful and legitimate questions about what Amazon was doing hosting the anarchist collective WikiLeaks, a group inciting the hacking of stolen U.S. government documents (and we don't know the extent of their possible hacking as well) and publicizing stolen classified government documents, the left when ballistic. The human rights groups went into escape velocity. There was a huge uproar about the "chill" of this *elected official* engaging in a *proper policy action* that was a question and a call to accountability with the company's own TOS, not some sort of "command".
Meanwhile, Sen. Durbin tells Facebook how to run their business and organize the governance of their customers, and nobody complains. Interesting, that! Jillian York urges this to be done, and may have engineered it (she certainly advocated it). [UPDATE: Jillian York denies contacting Sen. Durbin and is "amused" at this concept and "flattered" that he may have read her work. I can only shrug and say, ok, Jillian, then which *other* Berkmanite or follower of yours contacted him?]
Suddenly, a liberal Democrat advocating something to a company is ok; a conservative independent advocating something to a company isn't ok.
This is why politicians should not be making policy in this way.
Got an idea for how social media should be governed? Have a hearing. Do reports. Study. Write legislation. Don't achieve it by telephone justice and op-ed browbeating.
The other piece of this which I find HUGELY offensive is Durban's demand that Facebook join the Global Network Initiative. I'm going to have LOTS to say about that in a thorough critique I'm preparing of this, but I don't think companies should be joining it: not when it has Electronic Frontier Foundation in it, which is openly and actively undermining copyright law and whose board members such as Mitch Kapor and John Perry Barlow advocating openly and aggressively for the removal of intellectual property rights -- it looks to me that the agenda here is under the cover of mainstream liberal human rights concerns like freedom of expression, to smuggle in the leftist political agenda of copyleftism, "Net Neutrality" etc.
Furthermore, I don't think Internet policy should be set by IT companies, elite human rights groups, and a few of their special government official friends or senator friends. I think it has to be set by the companies themselves. Otherwise, government is too intrusive on the Internet and is controlling the Internet, and otherwise, the very obvious political interests of the groups involved hold sway unfairly over public policy.
Nobody wanted the Communications Decency Act. So don't smuggle in your own version of the CDA in this fashion, ushering in a world of both politically-correct "civility" on some issues, moral blindness and selectivity on others, and promotion of unaccountable anonymity.
Yes, leaving it to the companies is far from a perfect set up -- I've been fighting lousy corporate TOS for 6 years and I'lll be the first to say the TOS is the greatest threat to our freedom of expression today in America. Only the free market of ideas and services can solve this problem, however. I want there to be freedom of association and freedom of choice. Again, the solution is for diverse groups (not just one coalition) to promote what they view as good policies that a company can voluntarily adopt, and have a range of options, some with full-tilt First Amendment, some with full-tilt privacy, some without.
It's good that Facebook refused to testify at Durbin's hearing, although it's good he asked, too. He could have used a McCarthyite power of subpoena that Congress has used sometimes, but that would be wrong. Facebook -- and other NGOs -- should not be pressured by government to make policies -- good or bad on social media. They should be democratically pressured by the market, their customers, and their boards of trustees.
FACEBOOK AND TWITTER SHOULD NOT JOIN GNI
I do strongly and fervently hope that Twitter and Facebook stay off GNI. Just because it has human rights groups in it, including some I've worked for, doesn't mean that it is sacred. While it has a right to form and campaign for whatever it wishes as we all do, it's a lousy idea to have elite cabals run Internet policy. This group in particular in fact has been overrun by Google already and is adopting compromise Google-interested statements that run against morality and the spirit of human rights -- like the contorted compromise statement opposing the Italian judiciary system's attempt to curb Google/Youtube when a disabled boy was harassed in a Youtube on the Internet by Anonymous -- in order not to put that "chill" on freedom of expression, Google fought a court order to remove the offensive content harassing the boy -- and this halo'd bunch then blessed this. That's morally wrong, whatever the First Amendment test they want to apply.
In a regime with company's discretion, enough people abuse report it, the company finds it is "broadly offensive" or "inciting violence" or "inciting hatred" and removes it -- and there isn't the damage or "chill to freedom of expression" that human rights groups imagine, because there's always the next case and the next abuse report and adjudication -- and eventually a jurisprudence (I'm for these companies publicizing all disciplinary actions against customers AND publicizing the names of those who file abuse reports AND the name of the company staff member who prosecuted the case -- it's the only way to prevent abuse by any or all of the parties).
GNI advocated for immorality for the sake of law -- and that's why we can't have elite groups legislate morality for us -- it should be left to the companies themselves, and they should form a continuum from privacy to publicity, from First Amendment complianct to "civility" -- as different groups conceive it. If enough Italians left Youtube and went to some other service or their own hosted websites, Google would get the idea.
IDENTITY HELPS KEEP OUT THE SECRET POLICE AND THEIR ENABLERS
The activists demanding pseudonymous cover for their activism -- which can be publicly supported, sectarian, good, or bad -- and claiming that failure to provide this feature does the work of the secret police aren't getting the other side of this issue at all. Groups from Iran and Belarus and other repressive situations use Facebook to avoid the secret police and their informants by having trusted, verifiable friend networks in their friend list or groups. A good way to get away from the harassment of both anonymous secret police and their enablers and freelancer helpers is to go in a Facebook group. It's not foolproof, but it sure beats trying to achieve the same purposes of more private discussion or organizing or strategizing on an open website or a Google Groups that allows anonymous accounts to join.
The lever for privacy and accountability has to be in the hands of the individual -- not the state, and not corporations. But the state and corporations should provide a range of options so that this lever can slide up and down comfortably.
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