I can remember being in The Holte End at Villa Park back in 1998 and watching Stan Collymore score an absolute screamer against Athletico Madrid in a European football match, it wasn’t enough to keep Villa in the competition but the atmosphere at the match was awesome. Years later Stan has became a pundit in print and radio. Today he reopened his Twitter account after closing it down for 12 hours. The reason Stan temporarily closed his account was due to what he reportedly perceives as a lack of action by Twitter to combat racist abuse and death threats. The radio station he works for, Talksport, have banned all references on air and in print to Twitter as they also don’t believe Twitter do enough to combat abuse.
I’m glad to see Stan’s account back on Twitter, not because he used to play for The Villa, but because deleting your account let’s the trolls win, although I fully understand why people who make such a decision feel it is the only option. The thing is, the vast majority of Twitter is a pleasant experience.
One of the criticisms of Twitter is the anonymous nature of the site, which many claim allows people to troll without worry. Although there have been cases whereby Twitter trolls have been arrested and charged for their actions. So people often aren’t as anonymous as they’d like to think they are. However the last thing we need in social networking circles is heavy handed and conversation stifling solutions.
An interesting article appeared on The Guardian last week: Why should I reveal my ‘real identity’ online? Anonymity isn’t so terrible. The article makes some very sensible points regarding identity and why posting with your real name everywhere using one account isn’t such a wonderful concept:
One of the beauties of the internet is the anonymity of your identity. Not the kind of disposable anonymity you get in comment pages that require no sign-in, but the kind that allows you to have separate identities that are independent of each other. Reading some of the more alarmed talk surrounding this subject, you’d get the impression that this is a terrible calamity, and civilisation can only be restored if every interaction you have on the internet comes attached with your name and address, like the tags your mother used to sew on your school clothes.
This is the point oft missed when it comes to debates about online identities, online identities are identities, ok they may not be your actual real name but many an author doesn’t use their actual real name either, indeed it was once fashionable for newspaper and magazine columnists to use, shock horror, a pseudonym or even have different authors use the same pseudonym. Robert X Cringely is one glaring example, that actually got quite complicated regarding who was allowed to use the name. Another, that some may remember was Lloyd Managram who was a columnist for the Sinclair Spectrum magazine Crash. Years later I discovered he never really existed. Does this matter? Absolutely not as it was the content I was interested in.
People often use different identities and engage in different activities, in different circles. I know some people down the pub by their nickname only, their family may not even know they have a nickname. Which brings us to TechCrunch. I pretty much stopped reading TechCrunch back in 2011 when they introduced Facebook comments. I have never commented much on TechCrunch but the Facebook push was just a huge turn off. Facebook comments reduce trolling, they also reduce commenting full stop. This was exemplified in January 2013 when TechCrunch made a plea for commenters to come back and announced their experiment with Facebook comments was over:
It was early 2011 and TechCrunch’s comment section was overrun with trolls. Bullies and asshats were drowning out our smart commenters. We hated our commenters because, well, they hated us. So we Facebook Comments in an attempt to silence the trolls — by removing their anonymity.
But we eventually discovered that our anti-troll tactic worked too well; The bullies and asshats left our comments sections, but so did everyone else. Now, several years later, after dozens of endless meetings and conference calls, we’ve decided we’re going to try out Livefyre instead of Facebook Comments.
Frankly, our trial with Facebook Comments lasted way too long at too steep of a cost. Sure, Facebook Comments drove extra traffic to the site, but the vast majority of our readers clearly do not feel the system is worthy of their interaction.
And we want our commenters back.
One would think that would be that? However no, in December 2013 TechCrunch embraced Facebook comments once more, managing to completely miss the point:
We know that the lack of anonymity is an issue with Facebook Comments, but we’re willing to accept that in return for a commenting system that is relatively stable. We also like the idea of comments sorted by Facebook Likes versus recency, and Facebook offers that as a default. Sometimes it’s that simple.
The issue isn’t anonymity, it’s more pseudonymity for many but what’s more amazing about TechCrunch’s decision is that having driven away commenters the first time around, they seem to be somehow oblivious to it happening again.
Then there’s the issue that TechCrunch is a tech blog, therefore its failure to embrace a comfortable commenting system is rather incredible. I’m not sure what they have against Disqus. However the bigger issue is this insistence that it’s an anonymity versus real identity thing in commenting circles, it’s really not. There are many people, who like the guy with the nickname, are known by their pseudonym or another name.
Back in 2011 Salman Rushdie had a battle with Facebook because his first name isn’t Salman, so Facebook apparently didn’t want him to use it on his Facebook profile, but Salman Rushdie is the name he is famous for.
However it’s not just issues like that, which make embracing Facebook in the comments so unappealing, for many people it will be that their workplace has a social networking policy and whereas they will post on Facebook, commenting on issues on a tech blog, when you work in the tech industry, becomes a bit more troubling because you could well find yourself in breach of that workplace social networking policy. This stifles conversation, although there are far more serious situations whereby people won’t want their real identity associated with the discussion, this comes in support circles for people who have been abused, suffered serious illness, mental ilness or just want to talk about a subject they aren’t comfortable talking about with their immediate family and friends. Many feel more comfortable talking with a blanket of at least some anonymity and these discussions really can help people.
Of course trolling is not new and did not arrive with the digital age, poison pen letters were around many moons before the Internet was even envisaged, but the difference with the Internet is that the reach is vastly enhanced.
Surely a happy medium can be found. When people from Second Life circles comment, many of them use their avatar name, not just on the Second Life forums, but on other blogs and forums too. Many of those people are not anonymous, they have payment histories with Linden Lab, so were those people to engage in silly threats, extremely obnoxious online behaviour or criminal activity, it shouldn’t be that difficult for the authorities to hunt them down.
There needs to be a balance between people discussing issues and people not having to undergo serious abuse for having an opinion. Keeping the conversation going is important, but there may well have to be some price to be paid for continuing those conversations in terms of sharing more information with the site operators, on the other hand full blown real identities only really will nerf the conversation.
Personally I’d like to see more intergrated use of pseudonyms, a pseudonym can follow people from site to site, it becomes an identifier the more it gets used and therefore people will want to protect it, but a pseudonym also allows the conversation to flow.
I have a persistent pseudonym that I’ve used for over fifteen years, and I’m actually much more findable under this name than under my legal name – at least online. In my experience, people grow attached to their pseudonyms and how they present themselves within them, and so the dangers of a bad reputation are as strong as with a legal name (which is not always very much – people have been horrible using their legal identities and work emails).
As someone who considers Deoridhe my name, as much as my legal name is my name, I find the increasing demand for using a “real” name troubling – especially as it often carries gender and racial prejudice along with it. For example, since Deoridhe is not overtly gendered, I have gotten far less gendered abuse over the years than I might with a more obviously gendered name. There are also instances of G+ disallowing people from using their legal names if those names combined several languages, or seemed strange or non-European. There are also valid reasons for wanting to keep ones legal identity separate from a broad internet presence, and people seem really quick to leap to conclusions which are really insulting – like that we are ashamed of what we do online.
The entire idea of having a single identity which is always visible along with ones entire history is really new, but people act like it isn’t.
You raise many excellent points, not least that it’s not normal for people to go around with one visible name in the manner companies seem to want people to do these days, it goes against basic human instinct and everything we’re taught as children about being careful who we talk to and what we reveal, we take these concepts into our adult lives too,
You also make an excellent point regarding investment in your pseudonym, the more you use it, the more care you will naturally take and you’re not going to want to sully your reputation, it becomes an identifier and one you cherish.