For me I would hold the social media companies more to account when it comes to hate speech and harassment online and force social media companies to do more to stop online harassment and hate speech.
For me I would hold the social media companies more to account when it comes to hate speech and harassment online and force social media companies to do more to stop online harassment and hate speech.
Can you elaborate on how exactly we would hold them accountable? What mechanisms precisely would you use without violating reasonable expectations of privacy (and no, posting online doesn’t mean you should have your real identity tracked or exposed just because the post is publicly facing like on Twitter, YouTube comments, reddit, and especially Lemmy.)
deleted by creator
IP bans usually don’t work well on the modern internet. Many ISPs use CG-NAT with very rapidly changing IPs shared by many users. Places like college dorms are the worst.
Looking up which accounts stem from which IP is also a moderate invasion of privacy.
The usual issues with “banning the accounts that are constantly being used to harass people” are:
Clearly defining harassment vs legitimate discussion
Figuring out who’s actually being unreasonable - is one party being baited into responding, then that response is reported?
Having enough staffing
Not really. You can store the IP only when you actually have ban-worthy content from an account and then compare that to the IP for subsequent requests to enforce the ban. The IPs of everyone communicating with your service are required for that very communication so they will be on your system anyway and you are only really required to store it for the person who already demonstrated ban-worthy behaviour in which case this is the minimal step you can take as far as privacy invasion goes (as opposed to e.g. trying to figure out their identity from their IP) if you want to enforce the ban at all.
I agree that IP bans just aren’t effective any more though due to CGNAT and IPv6 Privacy Extensions among other things.
It depends on the exact choices made by the developers, but generally the IP used by a user to make a post will always be logged - I think that’s now moving into legally required in some jurisdictions.
Mods/admins seeing that is a potentially different matter.
Seeing the IPs a user has used and what others have used them, or at least some sanitized version, can be helpful and I would argue is necessary before considering an IP ban.
Are there 50 other accounts on the same IP, and they all always post from that one IP? Either you have a really prolific sockpuppet, or you’re about to ban a whole college dorm or big office, and maybe generate a shitload of bad publicity.
Does the user post from a wide range of IPs already? Then there’s no point in issuing an IP ban; they probably won’t even notice.
It’s too easy to bypass an IP ban. That’s why providers have moved to tying accounts to things that should be harder and harder to replace - and more and more invasive. Email > phone > government issued ID…
This is already being done by most. You mistake the inability to keep up with the sheer volume with a platform taking inaction. Even with a paid full-time team of 10 people (about what a team size is at any corporation) doing nothing but content moderation, user reports, and even automated bans, you cannot keep up with the raw volume of bad actors. What you can do is keep trudging through it and keep it cut back so it doesn’t go wild.
Ask 4chan how well IP bans work.
Realistically, the law forcing platforms themselves to moderate better is probably our best bet, but even that is a sloooow drag.
Look at Twitter. In Germany alone there are hundreds of cases of hate speech (probably beyond a thousand now) that the courts could use to really, and I mean really hammer down on Twitter.
All of these cases combined could amount to fines in the billions, making one single country capable of destroying that platform.
That’s old news by now, and nothing happened. So… yeah.
They said hold the platform accountable, they didn’t mention holding the poster accountable.
I don’t see what needs to or is implied to change regarding privacy merely from increased accountability - and especially not the platforms as a whole.
I made a bit of a logical fast-forward in my statement. By holding the platforms accountable, you’re asking them to take action against their userbases. There is no other way for them to “take accountability.”