https://www.tv2.no/a/10216199/
Translated from Norwegian:
To prevent bullying online, Prime Minister Erna Solberg wants it to be impossible to send messages anonymously.
Prime Minister Erna Solberg (Conservative Party) is one of many who has engaged themselves in the debate in the case about bullying against 17 year old Johannes Wold from Spydberg.
Johannes, who was born with a chromosomal abnormality, received very severe, harassing messages on the app "Tik-Tok", one of many apps where the sender can be anonymous.
On such apps, anyone can send messages that end up online, without it being possible to identify the sender. In other words, it's easy to get away with online bullying and hateful statements.
Prime Minister Erna Solberg now wishes for such anonymity online to not be possible.
"I wish it was possible that if it was severe matters, that you have the possibility to find out who it is, and to do something about it", says the Prime Minister.
"Not desired"
Torgeir Waterhouse is one of the country's foremost experts on digital media. His opinion is that it's not desirable to remove the possibility to be anonymous.
"It's neither possible nor desirable. There will always be services that are anonymous and that are made to be anonymous", he says.
"A good example is an app that also was used in Norway some years ago, called Saharah. It was made so that you could be anonymous, because it was originally made to be used in countries where you can't trust the authorities and where you can report unbearable conditions", explains Waterhouse.
Waterhouse thinks that the app itself is not the problem, but that the service can be abused. Therefore he urges adults to pay more attention to what the children are doing.
"Learn what is going on with your children. You don't need to be an expert on digital matters, but you have to be an expert on your role as an adult", finishes Waterhouse.
"Democracy is not improved by anonymity"
Prime Minister Solberg disagrees with Waterhouse.
"One thing is if you are reporting about something [as in whistleblowing], and have some serious crimes to talk about where you need anonymity. But I don't think that our democracy is improved by anonymity, it is in fact improved by presenting ourselves with face and name", she says.
"Especially on these youth apps, to show games and social activities, anonymity is a bad thing", in Solberg's opinion.
/pol/ probably wouldn't be the cesspit it is now if it actually had people talking to each other instead of faceless automatons in their own perfected echo chamber.
But resetera would be the cesspool that it is,
i feel like what she's talking about is a cultural issue, not an inherent issue of anonymity. though its horrible how people abuse it
whats stopping you from just flipping on a vpn or using 1.1.1.1
Removing anonymity won't help curb bullying. Bullying happens in Instagram and Facebook too.
Politicians need to wise up
Oh look, another person who doesn't understand how the internet works. Shocker.
I might not stop bullying but it does allow people to be punished if they drive someone to suicide or something. That being said, I don't know how often those kinds of bullies (or, criminals rather) get punished in Norway.
I'm surprised they didn't bring up fake accounts uses by countries like Russia to influence discourse as a reason.
I thought we'd collectively moved past the point where adults were completely uninformed about the Internet. I guess not.
Removing anonymity would be a monumental job and is so easy to bypass that I'm starting to get Nazi pug memories rise anew
You can do it. You just kinda end up resembling China...
All this does is ruin everything because of a few assholes, fuck off, go away, stop
She probably doesn't have bad intentions with it, but she completely fails to understand the fundamental importance of anonymity.
The internet is far bigger than her little social media bubble. Online bullying is such a small drop in the ocean.
I don't disagree with the idea of removing anonymity but you can't. What you can do is provide forums and platforms of your own where you can make it impossible. One one hand social media's like Facebook and Twitter need to be regulated more because they play a huge part in the democratic societies of our world but I also think we need new platforms not run by private organizations with profit motivation.
imma be real with u erna solberg prime minister of norway
this is not how you counter cyberbullying
Ah bugger, another one of our neighbours we're gonna have to be careful about sending our internet traffic through (assuming this goes anywhere at all). Sweden's already caused problems with our stricter privacy legislation in the past iirc.
You do realize this is literally what China does to control their populace, right? The entire concept is flawed. You do not remove privileges from people who have done nothing wrong just to deal with a minority who could be dealt with other ways.
Yeah you're absolutely right, I don't know why I said that I thought removing anonymity is a good thing because I don't think it is, I think that having platforms where you can't be anonymous is a good idea.
funny you mention china cause there's been some ruckus about china having influence over our mobile network as of late
I'm behind 20 VPN, can't find me.
Bullying and Harrasement are not 'small minorities' of our internet space. Its how Donald Trump got elected, or part of it anyway.
Anonymity is great, up until you realize that every human being becomes an unrepentant asshole when they realize they can get away with shit.
Every*
*Every may not actually include everyone.
As I hinted at in my response to MrJazzy there's other very valid reasons for anonymity. For one thing not having your government track everything you do online and penalize you over things they don't want you to say. Ie: Criticizing your government. Even here in the US, as shit as it is at the moment, you're perfectly free to go on and on about how shitty the US government is. Go to China and give that a shot, see what happens.
Well they should fuck off with that shit. It's bad enough when the US or Russia fucks around with other countries but one that authoritarian is just completely out of line.
We've all been rampant assholes, several long term and metastudies have shown that every internet goer at least at one point has been a total fuckwit on the internet.
There are plenty of valid reasons, one of the most important being the free flow of information and whistle blowing, but don't act as if that anonymity has not lead to a whole mountain of other issues such as pedophile rings, terrorist/extremist recruitment, the ability of governments to so thoroughly fuck with that free flow of information that its impossible to tell if a whistleblower is telling the truth.
China is putting down the brick and mortar for a 1984-esque hellscape but Russia is equally as fucked with its anonymous internet because they've created an entire internet space where nothing can be believed and when nothing can be believed an authoritarian can becomes the source of truth.
The internet, in its current incarnation, is a wild west of brilliant and terrible outcomes, there are very few inbetweens and we need to reconcile and redesign it so that it better works with how we actually interact as people because as of right now its a multilayered pile.
So if given the chance, Norway would use a lack of anonymity to impose an authoritarian thought control regime with no regard for its citizens?
You do not remove privileges from people who have done nothing wrong just to deal with a minority who could be dealt with other ways.
Yes you do though, and this happens in every society and civilization.
You remove the right of the majority who is capable of driving at 100, and impose a restriction based on the threat posed by those who can't. And then you have less (not 0) traffic deaths.
You remove the right of the majority who is capable of drinking responsibly, and impose a restriction on alcohol purchases at certain times. And then you have less (not 0) deaths of alcohol poisoning etc.
I truly do not see a reason why this should not be expanded to anonymity on the internet, since the threat of being radicalized via the internet is IMHO greater to the stability of a society than the former two examples.
I truly hope that I get shown the error of my ways instead of dumbed into the space between dimensions or something, but just taking anonymity for granted is pretty silly.
No, probably not since Norway's a decent enough country to my knowledge. However there's a very important detail to take note of about that: There is no guarantee it will remain that way. And if that ever does change then a pre-existing system to subvert anonymity will make it that much easier for them to abuse their power and silence dissidence.
Uh... No? They can still drive. There's a difference between setting upper limits on something that can easily be dangerous, especially when most people aren't capable of safely driving at those speeds and even those who are, are still heavily impaired compared to slower speeds. The point of a speed limit is to hit the best balance between speed and safety.
Though in many cases, at least here in the US, it should be looked over. In a lot of places it's outdated and could do with going up a bit in places due to more modern safety standards on cars. (In the NW United States, on the highways almost nobody including the police actually adheres to the speed limits we currently have, for example. It's 55-70mph depending on the exact location and you'll commonly have people going as fast as 80.) There's also places where the speed limit is now too high because it was set when a given area was rural and saw little traffic. I've run into a handful of places where I've gone around a corner at the speed limit and really didn't feel terribly safe doing so even with low traffic.
Also a bit of a side note but are you talking km/h or mph when you say 100 anyways? If you were in the US I'd assume the latter and 100 is fairly slow in km/h but since you didn't specify I figured I'd ask to be sure.
Sure, you have a point there... One that I never defended to begin with. I agree, that entire situation is blatantly retarded to anyone with two brain cells and should just not be an issue.
The issue with that train of thought is that the problem doesn't stem from anonymity. Many of those doing the radicalizing of a given country's populace are in another country, for example. So discarding anonymity wouldn't actually help there.
I'm not certain if this bit was actually directed at me or not but I tend to only do that if someone's being legitimately stupid or obtuse, which you aren't.
Why do we presume that this will happen? I don't see how the chance that Norway, for example, will turn into an abusive power hungry thought crime state, than that it will just continue with the status quo, continuing to educate the populace, and never go there.
If we go for the "better safe than sorry" approach then there's so many more things you could implement that are more effective. Say like, a national ID system which clearly logs your use of public services, which I support, provided there is accountability.
surely you wouldn't mind posting your full name and city of residence here, then?
Did I imply that's what my idea of this is? The point is that if the government needs to find who posts something online, they should be able to do so, so you don't have places without accountability where anyone can call for anyone's death directly without any repercussions.
If you ever thought killing internet anonymity means you tell literally everyone anywhere always forever your social details then I can't tell whether you're making a strawman out of malice or ignorance.
the capacity of governments to abuse the power is dissuasive enough. though those currently holding office might have the best intentions, that is not guaranteed going into the future.
additionally, it has been demonstrated throughout the years that even the largest companies have issues with cybersecurity, if laws are put in place that postings by people must have a clear identity associated with them i do not trust companies to keep such information secure. South Korea, up until 2013, had most of their websites require people use their Resident Registration Number to sign up. the reason this stopped in 2013 is because of hacking incidents resulting in 70% of all SK's residents getting their RRN leaked, leading to a lot of identity theft.
how would something like this be put into place? what would happen with noncompliant websites, or websites based outside of the country where such legislation have no effect? would they be blocked?
And people already defending government overreach from the first reply.
Excellent.
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