on anonymity

[acroyear]

Nym Wars | jwz:

When the rebuttal to your argument is The Federalist Papers, generally that means that you've lost the argument.

-- JWZ on Google's insistence on forcing everybody to use real names.

Comments

[thelongshot.livejournal.com]

So, why is Google+ more of an issue than Facebook? Don't they both have a real names policy? It seems like the only reason why Google+ is getting all this attention is because of the heavy-handed way they have handled violators?

[acroyear70.livejournal.com]

yeah, the heavy-handedness. When ALL of your google services are disabled (gmail, picasa, youtube, docs, groups), just because they didn't like your pseudonym on G+, that's just stupid. And while paying lip service to the problem (and restored services to some of those affected, but not all), they haven't really either admitted they were wrong, nor responded with an official policy update that says they won't do something that stupid again.

Facebook's case at least has some press about it - the fake accounts have actually been used for cyberbullying, and the suicides got quite a lot of press. Their "solution" doesn't solve the problem in the slightest, but at least they had an explanation.

Google is actually trying to argue against anonymity and pseudonymity on philosophical grounds, on the idea that anonymity itself is simply inherently evil or wrong. For being full of supposedly smarter people, it is a VERY stupid thing to be doing.