Thread by @SecretGamerGrrl

I really do hate how about once a year someone with absolutely no background in studying hate groups or the dynamics of social media pile-ons comes out with one of these grand proclamations that "nobody would have to deal with harassment if not for all those anonymous trolls."

https://twitter.com/setoacnna/status/1287680923958489088

First off, nobody is actually anonymous on social media.

Anonymity is when a message is printed which is not accredited to anyone.

If a reporter explains how an unnamed source at a meat packing plant warns of an e. coli contamination in a recent shipment, that's anonymous.

If a letter with no return address is slipped under your door instructing you to leave $20,000 in a duffle bag under a park bench if you want your child not to be murdered, that's anonymous.

But if you get a hateful message from someone with the username Poopyballs69, that's not

anonymous. That is a signed message. You know exactly who sent it. Poopyballs69 is the person harassing you.

Now, it's safe to assume that is a pseudonym, not his actual legal name, and in my experience this is where the sort of idiot who shouts about "anonymous trolls" might

call me a pedant for pointing out that he's saying "anonymous" when what he really means is "pseudonymous," but no, that's actually a real damn important distinction, because the protections from consequence that come with saying something anonymously all depend on being unable

to trace the message to its source.

We know the source, in this case. The source is Poopyballs69. He has a publicly visible twitter account. That twitter account is tied to his phone number. Every message he posts from that account is logged.

If the consequences we wish for him

to deal with as a result of this harassment are on the level that Twitter should do something, Twitter absolutely has all the information they need to do it. He's in their database. They control access to his account. They even have a system to flag the threat for someone to see.

If the harassment is more serious than that, i.e. something where the law is involved, Twitter can pass along the large body of information they have regarding the actual identity and whereabouts of that person just fine too.

The barrier to consequences in this scenario is not

by any means the inability to identify who sent the message. It's entirely a matter of whether Twitter agrees that Poopyballs69 should be in any way held accountable for his harassment of you.

And for the record, 99 times out of 100, Twitter will not agree with you, because the

idea that Twitter, the company, actually WANTS to put an end to all the harassment people conduct via Twitter, the platform, but just somehow can't enforce their terms of service against a malicious registered user of their product is an absurd ridiculous fantasy, you silly child

Twitter actively chooses to almost never enforce any sort of consequences for harassers, especially those whose entire presence on the site is completely dedicated to spreading hate.

And this is not me speculating. This is me having worked with an anti-harassment organization to

compile a detailed report on the 20 most dangerous neo-nazis weaponizing accounts on this site, which was handed to them in a face to face meeting, that Twitter themselves arranged, in which they glanced at the report, recognized those 20 handles, and proclaimed that they would

take no action against any of them, because, if I properly recall the quote, "we like these guys." So quit mistaking malice for incompetence. Twitter is not your friend.

THAT said, a guy with the handle Poopyballs69 sending you a message saying "kill yourself" or whatever is not

a significant source of harassment in the first place. That's one hateful message from one account. When you see that, you can just go ahead and block that one account, and move on with your day.

Now granted, it's entirely possible, even likely, that Poopyballs69 is just one of

50 or so accounts on particular troll has, and he might just rapidly switch over to the others to send more hateful messages to you, but again, that's not an anonymity issue. That's a "Twitter allows trolls to register 50 accounts and rapidly switch between them to attack" issue.

They could very easily simply not allow any given person to do that if they were inclined. The problem is that they are not inclined. They in fact recently implemented rapid account switching to better facilitate trolls doing exactly that sort of thing.

But again, small potatoes

Real serious harassment is when someone just paints a target on someone and outsources the harassment to their tens of thousands if not millions of troll account followers.

Poopyballs69, we can pretty safely assume, does not have millions of followers (by the way I just checked,

because it struck me that there is no way that is an unclaimed handle, and it actually DOES appear to belong to some random troll, who actually was one of those rare accounts Twitter actually suspended, so good to know I'm not incriminating a stranger).

To get that sort of count

you need to have made a name for yourself, like being the guy who wrote that propagandist article to keep conversion therapy legal, or the guy who runs that "news website" that just prints nazi pandering garbage, or someone broadly known for writing a TV show or book series.

Almost every single person who does this, therefore, uses their real full legal name everywhere. Especially when harassing people, so they know their fans will see it, to join in and defend them. And the few who don't still don't make any actual secret of what their real name is,

they just have some personal nickname they like to be called.

Meanwhile, while it IS true that Twitter is run by far right monsters who are happy to let their nazi friends use it to constantly harass marginalized people, the fact that people are generally allowed pseudonymity

means that those marginalized people can benefit from the level of protection that does actually offer- the safety of knowing that, just as an example, I, a trans woman constantly bombarded with death threats, can get messages out to the public, and encourage people to support me

via patreon, or e-mail me about doing work for them or whatever, without putting my full legal name out there for the many dangerous stalkers threatening to kill me to use to track me down to where I live and rape and/or murder me. That's pretty important, and people like me are

the only sort of people who would suffer actual harm if everyone were forced to post everything under their full legal names. The hatemongers would be completely unaffected.

And this isn't even getting into how Facebook DOES have a real name policy, which is routinely abused to

keep anyone who isn't white and cis from being able to access the platform, with trolls constantly reporting "suspicious names."