Should we end internet anonymity? | Hugh Tomlinson, Victoria Baines, Stephen Kinsella

it's not actually a free choice about whether or not you verify yourself [Music] a legal perspective you know with with anonymity is there that thing that there are things you wouldn't do in public life not only because you know they would contravene good manners and the way we all behave with each other but also in real life we count them as hate speech or you'd count

them as um you know actually going breaking laws and the moment you do it anonymously online it's fine nobody nobody's calling it out you can't be caught up called out well you can't obviously you can be called out and the platforms you know do close down I mean they're getting much much better closing down accountable for it but you're right they can't hold you accountable but

the police can investigate but you know using vpns or whatever you can it's quite it's quite easy to cloak uh uh cloak your identity and I mean I've I've come across cases where you know quite sophisticated abusers set up um attack sites where where that they they completely impossible to find out who they are and and you can actually cause a hell of a lot of

damage if you do it carefully and subtly and they've done that and you know there is no remedy no way of holding yourself yeah just I mean on the example so 4chan for instance I I from the perspective of my campaign I'm a bit less concerned about something like 4chan because it seems to me you know there are victims and volunteers those are people who they

know what they're getting into I'm more concerned about the likes of Facebook Twitter that those that are really our sort of virtual Public Square the places that people are being driven out of because uh because of the abuse they get and it seems unreasonable so I think we should have a higher level of protection and that's that's what the Online safety build is trying to do

is to get you know give us a high level protection for the for the major sites that we almost need to be on these days and the other distinction is between we're talking about legal but harmful yeah so uh some of the stuff we're talking about hate speech and that that is a crime so that of course gets treated in a different way what we're talking

about more is bullying harassment disinformation the stuff that we're never going to criminalize but we're never left need to try to give us the tools you mentioned friction our proposal introduces friction that's what it does on the verification before you you do and Stephen could you just set out exactly how this verification model would work so that people understand if if it comes into action how

their lives would change how would their their use of the internet change yeah I should say as a starting point we're very concerned we didn't want verification to be on another huge Trove of data for the large platforms that they can use to to monetize Us and Target us with advertising so there are some very good third-party verification Solutions out there and the for instance one

company called oneid they rely on the data you've already given to your bank in the UK 98 of us have have online banking or access to it we've already verified ourselves to them so we're not looking for us all to have to again upload our passport or our driving license and give more data to the platforms there are secure ways that you having done it once

of ways obviously they profit from anonymity because uh abuse toxic discussion drives engagement uh keeps people on the site longer that's one way the other course the fact that so many of the accounts out there are fake and you see I mean Elon Musk is concerned that Twitter might have more than five percent fake accounts we think the figures somewhere between 15 and 30 percent people

say it's that's true of Facebook as well but they are still selling those fake eyeballs to advertisers so and we don't know because we can't get access to the data I mean one of the things that the bill and other legislation wants to do is make these platforms at least give access to the data to researchers so that we can form a truer picture of what's

really going on but I think there are so many ways after all they could make these changes now if they cared about the user experience as much as they do say they do if they compared care about us as Citizens as much as they say they do they could introduce a lot of changes that would improve our lives online Victoria I mean I mean to see

that that unacceptable so yeah on kind of verification specifically um I wanted to know your perspective with the critique of verification that it risks potentially giving users a false sense of security in the unless platforms also have real name policies where you like you have proven to a platform that the name you are using on a website is exactly the same as the name that you've

verified yourself at it's like unless platforms use those which on the whole they've tried to introduce they don't work they again it's like trans people who change their name celebrities who want to have a private account in a different name teachers who want to hide who they are like there are too many like groups who really legitimately just shouldn't be using their real names or whatever

a real name is like so unless it goes hand in hand with real name systems doesn't it risk providing users a full sense of security that oh this person verified themselves but like we don't actually know if the name that they verified to the platform is the name that they're showing us that the pictures that they're showing the platform is the pictures that they're showing us

and the verification is just another thing that will like it will also be abused I think that that's a fair concern I mean I ideally I'd like to see a Cascade where right at the top we verified not only your name but your location also that we've verified any claim you make about yourself if I look on Twitter the number of people who claim to be

x-forces I mean how big was our army all these ex nurses all these ex-vets I mean so I would like to but I could also Imagine at a lower tier of protection we said well I just need to know you're a real person I don't need to know who you are I don't need to know the claims you make about your Zaza true but at the

top yes we would certainly say real name as an option again we're just talking about my right to say I want to screen out very I have a Cascade of risk levels and I want to set my tolerance for risk in terms of who I'm willing to deal with so this would be a system where users could decide that you don't just don't want to engage

with anyone who hasn't been fully verified yeah you can't be sure is a real person and you could turn it on or off so you might have put something out that you know is going to get a bit of a backlash you think well I'll dial it down for a few weeks until that passes and then I'll every time you leave one of these talks exactly

yeah nobody isn't verified can can message you with that is there a risk that you kind of create like a kind of two-tier of internet use this because it's not actually a free choice about whether or not you verify yourself right because the assumption is that if you haven't like like good people are going to verify themselves therefore if you haven't verified yourself like there's probably

something dodgy going on and like even if you have concerns about like where your data is going whether or not that's justified in the way that the system set up if you just have an issue with the principle about aren't you actually going to be kind of isn't there a coercion happening there into verifying yourself everything has a risk of unintended consequences one of the accounts

that I like and follow is called the secret Barrister and the clue is in the name incredibly popular house huge reach yeah um he where do you stand on this system of verification I think the problem is that the people like Stephen who are concerned about these issues and perhaps many people in the audience would take advantage of the system but it requires effort and you

know 80 percent of people aren't going to do it uh and so you you get a small number of clean very five people communicating with each other and then you get the rest of the world uh uh spewing out hate speech disinformation and so on as before so the the you know anything that requires people to to think to engage to take positive steps is going

to have a massive Fallout rate inevitably so actually we do we did polling with yougov and compassion in politics did polling through opinion and they found that 80 of people will do it people said said they would do it I'll try a different thing original preference yeah and who I mean do you think the financial incentives for big tech companies are just so high that it's

almost impossible now to to reverse the situation to end anonymity which which you'd like to see oh the the financial incentives for I mean I mean I agree with everything that Stephen said I mean there's no doubt that anonymity is financially beneficial to the big tech companies but the big tech companies do what they told I mean it's that they they can tweak their system in

any any way they want I mean I I always tell people the story I once had a case against Google where my client was being subject to all kinds of vile abuse and and Google effectively said they could do nothing about it technically impossible they said we said you know okay we sued them case went on for six months the week before the trial they said

actually you know not only is it technically possible but actually it won't cost us anything so so you know they were able to do now if you said to the tech companies you have to do this otherwise you can't operate in the UK they would do it so yes it's not in their financial interest but in in the end it's it's more in their financial interest

to to do it than to not operate in the UK at all Stephen is there a danger you know you've looked at this a lot but is there a danger that if you do Force these big tech companies to adopt this if you do end anonymity as much as you can online that you just force more and more people into effectively the dark web into the

less regulated versions of of tech platforms obviously I'm in our our proposal won't Force anyone to do anything because we're again we're focusing on rights so we're simply saying uh yes everyone will still have the right to be anonymous and they'll have the right to exercise their free speech anonymously however we are going to balance that so they all have their Free Speech but I'm going

to have a right not to be shouted at so we won't be driving anybody anywhere I do agree with you on sort the financial incentives for the platforms it is a question though equally um the UK is such a big digital Market that it's going to be very hard and we've you know how many times we heard companies and platforms say well if you change the

rules the way we don't like we're going to leave I mean other than the with the example of China that doesn't really happen there is another constituency though that also doesn't want change the likes of the status quo and that's our press because they in the Online safety Builder have argued so far for a carve out so that these rules shouldn't apply to them or to

their websites from which increasingly they make a great deal of their money so I mean just just explain that to the audience why the Press would want slightly different rules well the press always want different rules yes you know that's the journalist they can vouch for that exactly um they what's their real case I suppose they again say it's free speech they say uh we as

journalists ought to be able to to you know without fear or favor um but they extend that to their websites and of course that wouldn't be such a problem if we had effective press regulation I mean most other Industries generally if they can persuade the government to back off because they have you know effective self-regulation we don't in the case of the press so it is

a worry but this is you know this huge pushback I should say from MPS from all parties on this and there's very every opportunity for you all to add your voices if you're also concerned that we shouldn't allow the press to behave at carry on behaving in this way online and on their comments pages um I mean in a way anonymity is one of those issues

where you won't have the same problem with the Press because I've never met a journalist who doesn't want to buy a line well and I'm sorry the trouble is not just it's the comment section yes so so the bizarre thing is is is that the comment sections are going to be entirely unregulated so so as people have pointed out if I have a Twitter account which

I don't uh uh with five followers I'm subject to ofcom the Daily Mail with 60 million uh viewers is is not regulated at all in relation to its comment and the other thing is sorry to God about this but the other thing is that the way that the government have defined the Press I can just set up something called the newspaper and I can publish anything

I like and it's unregulated which is terrifying to continue watching this video click the link in the top left or in the description below or visit iai.tv for more debates and talks from the world's leading thinkers on today's biggest ideas