Online Anonymity Abuse: When Anonymity Becomes License to Menace

I have no illusions about ending the social menace of cyberbullying, trolling, or fake news. But each would be greatly reduced if

bullies, trolls, and fakers of all stripes were required to use their real names … like everyone else;
alerts were required to rate news sources and highlight lies, misinformation, and disinformation; and
networks were required to report perpetrators to law enforcement authorities for posting abusive, harassing, fake, or violent content.

I’ve been in the vanguard of efforts to get social media companies to ban online anonymity. I refer you to such commentaries as “Yet More Websites Banning Public Comments,” October 16, 2015, and “Ban Anonymous Comments to Save the Internet,” March 22, 2019.

This, in part, is why iPINIONS is hailing what could prove a giant leap for India, even if it proves only a small step for social media.

Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and TikTok will have to reveal users’ identities if Indian government agencies ask them to. …

The requirement comes as governments around the world are trying to hold social media companies more accountable for the content that circulates on their platforms, whether it’s fake news, child porn, racist invective or terrorism-related content.

(Bloomberg, February 12, 2020)

Mind you, the democratic US government can get a warrant to search your home, or even to draw your blood. Therefore, I see no reason why it should not be able to get one to search your phone.

Not to mention that

In this Information Age, tech companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Twitter, and WikiLeaks are masters of the universe. But they have created a schizophrenic human species – whose members share everything about everything, yet claim to be zealous about their privacy. Only this explains the growing outrage over the government’s National Security Agency (NSA) monitoring their promiscuous and indiscriminate digital footprints.

But there’s no explaining why these nincompoops think it’s okay for tech companies to spy on them to sell them stuff, but not okay for the NSA to do so to keep them safe.

(“Complaints about NSA Spying Are Schizophrenic…and Misguided,” The iPINIONS Journal, June 8, 2013)

Surely even you have had the unnerving feeling that your smartphone or virtual assistant must be eavesdropping on conversations you’re having in the privacy of your home; or worse, that it might be videotaping your every move …

This is why, apropos of terrorism-related content, I found the following such an untenable spectacle:

Hours after a federal judge ordered Apple to help the FBI unlock the iPhone used by one of the shooters who carried out the Dec. 2 terrorist attacks in San Bernardino, Calif., the technology giant’s chief executive declared that he would fight the government’s ‘unprecedented’ demands. …

Cook said Apple was ‘challenging the FBI’s demands with the deepest respect for American democracy and a love of our country.’

(The Washington Post, February 17, 2016)

Except that, like Google and other tech companies, Apple checked its democratic values at the border in order to do business in China. I have decried this in many commentaries, notably in “Yahoo Becomes China’s Most-Favored National Thought Police,” September 12, 2005, and “Google Adopts the Bush Administration’s Motto of Moral Relativism,” January 26, 2006.

But here is how Wired reported on Apple’s hypocritical apostasy on October 17, 2019:

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Earlier this month, Apple removed HKmap.live — an app that pro-democracy protestors in Hong Kong used to track police activity — from its iOS App Store [as well as] the Quartz news app from its China App Store, after the outlet extensively covered the protest movement in Hong Kong. …

‘Over the past several years, Apple has made a series of concessions in the realm of free speech and privacy protection … signal[ing] to the Chinese government that you are open to more submission,” says Yaqui Wang, a Human Rights Watch researcher who studies the country.

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In other words, Apple seems all too happy to provide Chinese authorities the kind of “back-door” access to users’ iPhones over there that it steadfastly refused to provide US authorities over here.

But I don’t think any tech or social media company should be able to assert constitutional protections to enable criminal activity, protect online abusers, or propagate fake news. The latter is why I welcome no less an influencer than George Soros to the fight of our times:

Billionaire financier George Soros has written to the Financial Times, calling for Facebook bosses Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg to leave Facebook.

He argued the social media platform’s refusal to remove political ads was ‘helping to get Donald Trump re-elected’.

(BBC, February 18, 2020)

For the record, I joined this fight (for a free and fair 2020 US presidential election) with “‘Unlike’ Facebook for Facilitating Trump’s Post-Truth Run to the White House,” November 18, 2016. And I’ve continued waging it with commentaries like “Political Ads: Twitter, Facebook, Fox News: The Good, the Bad, the Ugly. And Then There’s Google,” November 6, 2019.

To be fair, though, at least Zuckerberg is pretending to be interested in lording over a network that is known more for connecting people based on truth than dividing them based on lies.

‘One of the most painful lessons I’ve learned,’ CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote in late 2018, ‘is that when you connect two billion people, you will see all the beauty and ugliness of humanity.’

As a result, Facebook is establishing a board it says is independent, outside of control of the company’s leadership, that can ultimately overrule Facebook’s own policies on content management.

(Business Insider, January 28, 2020)

By contrast, Hell will freeze over before Rupert Murdoch establishes a similar “supreme court” to moderate content. After all, his aversion to truth in broadcasting is such that he could no longer even abide using “Fair and Balanced” as his network’s motto.

He dropped it like a bad habit three years ago. No doubt because he got fed up with people mocking its dimwitted Orwellian twist. After all, Fox News is easily the most unfair and unbalanced network in the history of television news.

This is why I reserved “the Ugly” for him in my commentary referenced above, which includes the following:

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Rupert Murdoch can fix all that is wrong with Fox News with one phone call. Yet he seems perfectly content to preside over a propaganda machine that would shock even Joseph Goebbels with awe. But it betrays the conspiracy among media honchos that other networks go after everyone at Fox except that old fox himself.

So here’s to mainstream and social media pillorying Murdoch mercilessly for acting as Trump’s willing propagandist. It’s bad enough that his Fox News makes Putin’s RT worthy of comparisons with the BBC.

But, his anchors present propaganda with such religious conviction, their gullible viewers can be forgiven for accepting it as coming from Cronkite’s mouth to their ears. And don’t get me started on all the captains of industry who blithely associate with Murdoch, when they should be treating this Trumpian Goebbels like a pariah.

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