arsCynic

@ arsCynic @piefed.social

Posts

25
Comments

165
Joined

5 mo. ago

⚜︎ arscyni.cc: a sentient stack of stardust pondering nothing and everything.📷︎ smetterling.eu: Bug Capture 🦋 Smetterling.

Moderating

Skateboarding piefed.social

9h ago

What the fuck is going on in the Pentagon?
Jump
3

arsCynic @piefed.social 9h ago
Surely this must be fake.

9h ago

Age checks could turn internet into an ID checkpoint and would kill anonymity, Proton CEO says

It's just remarkably disappointing that so many of said cohort is all for freedom or libertarian, but they simultaneously downvote comments into being hidden and offer no counter-arguments. The irony.

But I sigh at discourse online in general, on all sides, for it's riddled with fallacies. Or even downvotes and upvotes, they mean little to nothing. I know because as an admin I realize there's tons of people who use multiple accounts, not two or three, but tens of accounts, to skew the votes in their favor.

“Do you want “toxic speech” to become a crime and punished by a court of law?”

Bullying and disinformation, absolutely.

“How exactly would id verification help against that.”

From the paper What Deters Crime? Comparing the Effectiveness of Legal, Social, and Internal Sanctions Across Countries, citing a meta-analysis:

“On the whole, this meta-analysis favored rejecting the null hypothesis that legal sanctions have no deterrent effect on crime.” ―Meta Analysis of Crime and Deterrence: A Comprehensive Review of the Literature, by Thomas Rupp (2008)

The paper concludes as follows:

Our findings suggest that across societies and cultures, internalized moral standards exert the most powerful restraints on dishonest behavior (see also Campbell, 1964). Policy efforts aimed at promoting moral internalization may be more effective than efforts aimed at increasing the frequency or probability of legal sentences. However, the process by which internalization occurs remains poorly understood, and marks an important direction for future research aimed at reducing crime and enhancing social welfare.

As I said, is it the best solution? Science hasn't a clear answer either. What does seem to be agreed upon is that:

“The perceived likelihood that one will be caught is far more effective as a deterrent than the severity of the punishment.” ―Wikipedia - Deterrence: Likelihood vs. severity [Also stated in the aforementioned meta-analysis.]
That having the moral compass to realize something is wrong, will decrease someone succumbing to such wrongdoings.

My hypothesis is that complete anonymity, so a low probability of getting caught, increases toxic behavior because people suffer no bad consequences whatsoever and therefore never learn. Ever hung around a spoiled kid? They're the worst. The same happens online. Naturally, proper journalists and whistleblowers are a different thing, absolute anonymity is crucial for them. But how to square both these realities remains to be discovered.