(C) Alec Muffett's DropSafe blog.
Author Name: Alec Muffett
This story was originally published on allecmuffett.com. [1]
License: CC-BY-SA 3.0.[2]


anonymity – Dropsafe

2024-04

The silence is … notable. Not deafening, not shocking, there are still a handful of amped-up people on Twitter asking what has happened regarding Katie Price’s “Harvey’s Law” .

Recap

Katie proposes that that British people should sign up for social media accounts using strong identity credentials like driving licenses, passports, or (presumably) bank documents, credit cards, or other strong identifiers; she assumes that this requirement will reduce or eliminate online abuse, because it permits accountability.

Katie’s assumption is wrong, and her proposal will not work – although it is certainly catnip for the more censorious and authoritarian amongst British politicians.

It will not work, and in fact it may make online abuse (where it occurs) more fervent, because:

The Internet is a global communications space, and so “abuse” can and will be sent from accounts which were (apparently) created “outside” the UK It is trivial for someone in Britain to appear to be “outside” the UK, simply by using a VPN; and VPNs are already very popular for purposes of (eg) watching “foreign” television Anyone who is lowbrow enough to create an account for the express purpose of abusing someone else, is equally lowbrow enough to think they are being terribly clever by using a VPN, and therefore are likely to double-down on their abuse because they think they are “getting one over on the authorities” Speaking as a former engineer at Facebook: there is plenty of inter-person abuse on Facebook which already demands use of “real names”, so it’s a dubious assumption that accountability in any way will prevent abuse. Were it to be adopted, “Harvey’s Law” would be simply another click on the ratchet towards a “Digital ID Card”, leading to (e.g.) the banning of VPNs unless the users are registered and the connections all tracked, etc. Basically: having started down the path of presuming that “accountability will prevent abuse” then “more accountability” will become a mirage-like Government goal — always pursued and never obtained — leading to pursuit of accountability above all else, without ever addressing the actual, underlying social issues which encourage or enable abuse.

In short: Katie’s proposal is the wrong fix, for the wrong problem, and pursuit of that wrong fix will break a bunch of other stuff without ever making anything better.

Where are we now?

Katie hasn’t tweeted about #HarveysLaw since February 23rd; she hasn’t tweeted about #TrackATroll since March 24th, which is also the last time she mentioned her petition.

I am rather hoping that Katie is trying to let the matter drop, having been pretty comprehensively swamped by the #SaveAnonymity hashtag, pointing out to her in sympathetic ways the potential consequences of her proposal.

The “quiet” might be due to her recent engagement dominating her interest, or if we are uncharitable we might assume that her efforts will cool off for a few months or perhaps a year, until she wants or needs another media “bump”.

But that would be to miss the point…

The important takeaway from this is that: the proposal, and the petition, were resisted and flopped. This is in spite of them being very resonant with similar arguments being proposed in support of the Online Harms legislation, in pursuit of Age Verification, Age Assurance, and Verification of Children, Online (VoCO).

The failure of the Harvey’s Law proposals are a good way to force us to face the real problems, rather than to simply and incorrectly ascribe abuse to “a lack of internet identity” or “a lack of internet accountability”. The problem is within ourselves: we consider and (by omission) teach that online communication is “allowed” to be impolite, that it’s OK to be abusive, online.

We should fix that; and we must explain these observations to everyone, rather than wait for next year and yet another misguided “what we really need is ID-cards” non-solution.
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[1] URL: https://alecmuffett.com/article/tag/anonymity
[2] URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

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