Save Our Pseudonyms! - S01E03
The second of two shows on Identity and Content Abuse Mitigation.
News: Huffington Post to require ID to post, says “It’s good for you!” [Part 2]
Topic: Interview with Dr. Bernie Hogan of the Oxford Internet Institute - He says pseudonyms are important!
Tips: Where to get IDs - for your application, or to hide your real ID.
LINKS
Hogan, Bernie. “Pseudonyms and the Rise of the Real-Name Web” J. Hartley, J. Burgess, & A. Bruns (Eds.), A Companion to New Media Dynamics (pp. 290–308). Chichester, UK: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., Forthcoming
Hogan, Bernie. “The presentation of self in the age of social media: distinguishing performances and exhibitions online.” Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society 30.6 (2010): 377-386.
Identity brokers: http://gigya.com http://janrain.com
FB Accounts: https://www.google.com/search?q=buy+facebook+accounts
SPECIAL EDITORS NOTE:
After the recording of this episode, we were made aware of an official blog post by John Pavley CTO @ The Huffington Post: “Free Speech and Identity Verification: Combating the Challenge of Trolling” which explains additional details for what they have planned. These details do not match press accounts, or the impressions we had when we recorded the podcasts in this two-part series. Specifically, Pavley states that they will support pseudonyms, and that “real names” will be required, but as a secret known only to HuffPo staffers.
The difference between this and the “no pseudonyms” interpretation circulating about the new HuffPo policy is significant, and we think is still problematic, but not in all of the ways we detail in these two podcasts. Nonetheless, there is a reason we (and many in the press) jumped to “only real names” hypothesis for HuffPo’s move: We’ve heard it from several companies before.
This podcast talks about why pseudonyms are important to the ways that humans interact, and the research and advice we provide is relevant in many cases, including the new HuffPo posting policy…
There will definitely be a chilling effect on communication if the (secret real-names) policy is enacted.
TRANSCRIPTION
Randy: Welcome to episode 3 of the Social Media Clarity podcast. I’m Randy Farmer.
Bryce: I’m Bryce Glass.
Mark: And I’m Mark Smith.
Randy: This will be Part 2 of our two part series on a recent announcement by Huffington Post that they were going to not allow anonymous or presumably pseudonymous postings to their articles. Our last episode we discussed their presumption that people using real names would mitigate abuse, specifically prevent from posting bad things or, as they put it, it would facilitate civilized discourse.
Bryce: We talk quite a bit about how, if the goal of enforcing this policy is to mitigate abuse that they probably weren’t going to achieve that. That leaves the question of, well, what is it that they’ll achieve? So we’re going to talk about the likely outcomes of enforcing a policy like that, and I come back to a real simple concern - it’s likely to have a chilling effect on the level of discourse that happens on Huffington Post. We’ll squeeze out some examples that tend toward the extremes, though certainly people like political dissidents or reporters or reporters’ sources, folks of different gender persuasions that may not necessarily want those identities to every word they publish on the internet.
But then also think of the rank and file effect just on the common commenter – the experience of jumping on a site and sharing your opinion gets very different when you have the question of, oh, my real name - they promised to validate this. Validate it how? Maybe I don’t want to leave a comment, maybe that’s not the thing for me to spend my lunch hour doing today. I think it’s going to be a very interesting set of outcomes if they go through with this, and I’ll be really interested to see how that unfolds.
Randy: As we mentioned briefly last time, this has been attempted before by Blizzard, at World of Warcraft, when they were going to have people out their real identities on their message boards to remove trolling - bad behavior. What they found is that the women said they would quit the game and stop paying their monthly fees because now their gender would become part of the interaction when it was never part of the interaction before.
Mark: The real name movement may be similar to this trend of putting up pay walls around a lot of sites. I think we’ve seen that the pay wall trend has come and is now on its way back out. Maybe it’s the case that the real name trend will come and go, hopefully quickly as well, although there are larger changes that suggest that even if Huffington Post and sites allow you to have a pseudonym - don’t insist on the idea of a real name - there are services now that have assembled all of these pseudonyms and aligned them with real names, so this may have happened to us already.
Randy: Today we’re going to talk to Dr. Bernie Hogan of the University of Oxford about the problem of outing your real identity and how it can actually decrease the net quality of the interactions online.
Marc: With us today is Dr. Bernie Hogan from the Oxford Internet Institute, who has studied the role of identity and identifiers in online and social media communities. I’d like to get his comments on the idea of “context collapse” and its role in changing social relationships when real names are required.
Bernie: Hi, guys. Context collapse is a really interesting concept. It stems out of a more fundamental concept of online media - pretty basic – findability. Through new databases, search engines, people are more findable than ever before. Obviously, this has become a concern for our privacy advocates, but it’s just a part of everyday life. This initially led to a lot of people flocking onto Facebook when they wouldn’t even have adopted earlier software, thinking ‘wow, this is amazing, I can find my friends, my family members, old people from high school that I used to know and people that I might not want to find – ex-lovers, boyfriends, girlfriends and so forth’.
So this was a great idea - real names - you can search them, then you can find people through them, but the problem then is that all the content associated with those names becomes just as findable. So everything that people post on Facebook, if it’s not deliberately walled into a specific list or group, something done by a minority of users, then it’s findable by everybody on Facebook. So when we talk about context collapse, what we’re really talking about is the capacity for people, from a whole series of different walks of life, who know you, in order to read and see that content that you post under your real name. For the most part, this can be actually a really good thing.
It allows people to find new resources, get new sources of information from other people. It allows people to have a nice platform if they want to have a bake sale or find a place to live, or a new job. But the problem with context collapse is that a lot of things that people do in their everyday life involves some sort of status, some sort of difference. Whenever that difference happens - it could be I’m a student and I have teachers or I’m a teacher and I have students, it could be I’m a parent and I have children or I’m a child and I have parents – whenever there’s some sort of status difference, what we have is, I might post thinking about one context and someone of a different status is going to come and read that content.
Why is that a big deal? Well, imagine having to say, “I’m looking for a new job”, and your employer’s on Facebook. Imagine saying, “I got really hammered last night”, and your parents are on Facebook, or if you have a career where you’re expected to be a public servant of any sort - whether it’s a teacher, fireman, policeman - if you have people on your Facebook profile from different contexts who expect to see you as teacher, fireman, policeman, and then they start viewing content of yours that’s of a personal nature - it could be political opinions, it could be religion, it could be different sorts of drugs or alcohol that you’re consuming – all of a sudden you have this context collapse.
You have these people with different expectations of who you are coming to see you in a new and different light. What happens to this? Why is this even a problem? Well, obviously, it can cause certain status discomforts. A lot of times when we do things that are situationally appropriate, as in there’s a time and a place for them, when we put them online we take them out of time and place and we associate them with a real name. We take them out of the bar that I was in with the other people who were also drinking and playing pool and swearing and smoking, whatever, and now I put them on Facebook where the parents of my students might see. So what that means is that I am now more associated with something that I’ve done than the context in which it originally happened, or the situation in which it originally happened.
About five years ago this was a huge issue, and a lot of people were talking about drinking on Facebook, drunk photos, politicians putting embarrassing things up there, people of all walks of life either being fired or dismissed or not hired because of things that they had on Facebook. It was primarily because they weren’t thinking about this collapse of different kinds of contexts - getting rid of the idea that these things happen at a certain time and a place - and instead they happened to a certain real named person. Now, what’s that led to?
In the past 5 years there’s been increasingly less concern about this. People, instead, know that there’s certain way to approach Facebook. There is this certain attitude that Facebook is for one’s weak ties. Facebook is the lowest common denominator site for all of the different people that are involved in Facebook. That includes family and friends. So in past work, when interviewing people, some individuals have tried to get around this constraint, this sense of context collapse, by getting rid of a certain context.
For example, I have individuals who have troubled relationships with their family and do not have their family members on Facebook - people who are in the United Kingdom, where I teach - they have family back in the Middle East, and are very meticulously careful to ensure that the family in the Middle East don’t see the sort of content that the Westerners would put up, that they would view as shameful and vulgar – women that would be scantily clad and so forth. Instead, what we have now is the response to context collapse is not just this chilling effect on Facebook, but what we have is a notion that different sites play different roles.
We can only look to teenagers for the example of how this is playing out first. Teenagers are now leaving Facebook, not in droves, but it is no longer a site that is considered hot and exciting. To do that, one would have to go to Instagram, Vine, Snapchat, Tumbler or Twitter in order to see where the interesting cultural practices are happening, because Facebook is too constraining. Teenagers are leaving more than they are joining Facebook in a number of countries including America and New Zealand. In the OXIS report, the Oxford Internet Surveys report you can see that adoption among the 14 to 19 demographic is slightly down, even though adoption among the 40 to 55 demographic is up. They’re finding Facebook constraining. They’re noticing the chilling effect and they’re taking their culture, their new ideas, new fashion, new music, and they’re going elsewhere with it.
Randy: Bernie, could you comment on Huffington Post’s new policy to eliminate anonymous and pseudonymous postings and require new names, and how your research is likely to interact with that?
Bernie: Well, the past work I’ve done on Wikipedia is the closest that I can use to inform this. Through that, we’ve noticed that individuals who use their real names are very cautious about making certain kinds of comments, because of threats or threatening ideas that if they’re going to be somewhat impolitic, people could stalk them or dredge up information about them and use that against them in a debate. The comment section on Huffington Post is a place where people debate the news topics that are in the content above. Using real names invites individuals to make ad homonym attacks and it makes individuals reluctant to comment on certain stories, knowing that their professional reputation could be on the line for that comment.
Huffington Post is doing something sensible, but what they’re doing is effectively cheapening the site. They’re making an economic argument, not an argument based on civil discourse. The argument that they’re making is that it’s too expensive to moderate people. It is true that individuals feel disinhibited when they have pseudonymous accounts, but this inhibition, or the lack of inhibition, is not necessarily a bad thing. People may feel disinhibited to talk about a political issue that they wouldn’t talk about in polite company. What do they say are the three things that you’re not supposed to mention on a first date are? Religion, politics and sex.
People under pseudonyms can talk about them, and a lot of news concerns these topics. In order to give a particular opinion and to stand by that opinion makes it a difference whether we want to stand by that universally and defend it at all times or whether we want to mainly contribute or motivate a certain conversation. You could imagine celebrities, public figures, who may have participated online now being concerned about reputational damage for anything that they say online. You can also think of individuals who will then be - and this is a known fact, primarily more for women than men - that they will be harassed. Women will be stalked, sent awful messages, very crude messages, because individuals can now see them posting, find their email address, or just guess it from Google or Gmail and then send them harassing mail.
So individuals have been very, very concerned about the capacity for sites to enforce this, but again, it’s cheap. It’s going to cheapen Huffington Post. They’re saying it’s too expensive for the labor costs to moderate those people who are doing the worst content. So instead of spending the money to ensure that we have well moderated discussion boards, we’re going to make it cheaper by saying we have real name discussion boards. Now, they’re not going to get rid of the worst content - some people simply don’t care - but what they are going to do is minimize it, or at least lighten it somewhat. In the process of lightening it they are also going to lighten the content or contributions by individuals who would like to make a specific point but don’t want to have to defend that point indefinitely. They’re going to get rid of a lot of creative and unorthodox opinions as well.
It’s important to remember that pseudonyms are not just a mask that people put on. That’s the metaphor that gets used a lot. People think of a pseudonym as a mask – I’m masquerading, I’m taking on a new identity and I can use that identity to do something nasty or horrible or awful, but pseudonyms can also be used as a way to move to a different room in order to segment aspects of my life, just to make it easier, to give myself less of a mental burden. I don’t want to behave differently, I just want to behave around different people.
We often think of pseudonyms as a mask, and the mask idea makes a lot of sense for those who want to do a different personality – Lewis Carroll instead of Charles Dodgson, Mark Twain instead of Samuel Clements – but there’s also times where we just want to be who we are but be known or associated differently for that content. So we can think of a lot of times where people would change their names. The most common in America probably would have been at Ellis Island where a lot of immigrants, and particularly Jewish immigrants, would choose a name that would sound less Jewish so that they wouldn’t be discriminated in their jobs. They did not want to do different jobs, they did not want to be different people. They simply wanted to be given a fair chance to be treated equally.
Often, when people have certain kinds of names, or names that are solely identifiable, they won’t be treated equally. They won’t be given a fair chance to make a contribution to a discussion and have their contribution considered on its own merit.
Randy: Thank you very much for coming on the podcast. We look forward to seeing more of your research in the future. Thank you, Bernie.
Bernie: Thank you.
Randy: This week we’re going to actually have two tips – one aimed at the site or application designer:
1) How do you deal with gathering identity information, and how do you get effective identities even if they aren’t real names?
2) The other tip will be for end-users: What do you do in situations when you’re asked for your real name? Can you even hide your identity, and if so, how?
The quick tip is if you’re building an application, whether it’s a mobile application or a web application, and you want identity information from users who are not currently members, I highly recommend one of two platforms that’s available. They’re named Gigya, and Janrain. They aggregate all of the identity suppliers on the internet - Facebook, Yahoo, Google and LinkedIn and many others. You integrate them with your sites, and it allows users to use your sites using those identities. A lot of those are pseudonyms. A Yahoo ID is not a real name, but a Yahoo ID that’s been a long time has a lot of value. Likewise, you get a lot of interesting data out of Facebook, from their interface.
Bryce: This is a somewhat tongue-in-cheek recommendation, but if you find yourself a frequent visitor to Huffington Post and some day in the near future you’re challenged with presenting your real identity and you don’t feel comfortable doing that, it turns out there’s quite a robust black market in Facebook identities. You can buy likes for your fan pages. You can buy a fan page full of likes, and of course, you can buy a Facebook identity, depending on how much you’re willing to spend and how deep you’re willing to dig.
Mark: My tip builds on Randy’s tip. If you think that you have been maintaining separate identities on separate sites, the tip is that you may not have done so successfully. There are companies that have integrated your identity on multiple sites. They may know your different pseudonyms on different services and know that they all link back to you. The real name regime may be enclosing all of us, whether we like it or not.