YouTube has joined a growing list of social media companies who think
that forcing users to use their real names will make comment sections
less of a
trolling wasteland,
but there’s surprisingly good evidence from South Korea that real name
policies fail at cleaning up comments. In 2007, South Korea temporarily
mandated that all websites with over 100,000 viewers require real names,
but scraped it
after it was found to be ineffective at cleaning up abusive and
malicious comments (the policy reduced unwanted comments by an estimated
.09%). We don’t know how this hidden gem of evidence skipped the
national debate on real identities, but it’s an important lesson for
YouTube, Facebook and Google, who have assumed that fear of judgement
will change online behavior for the better.
Last week, YouTube began a policy of prompting users to sign in
through Google+ with their full names. If users decline, they have to
give a valid reason, like, “My channel is for a show or character”. The
policy is part of Google’s larger effort to bring authentic identity to
their social media ecosystem, siding with companies like Facebook, who
have long assumed that transparency induces better behavior.
“I think anonymity on the Internet has to go away,”
argued
former Facebook Marketing Director, Randi Zuckerberg. “People behave a
lot better when they have their real names down. … I think people hide
behind anonymity and they feel like they can say whatever they want
behind closed doors.” For years, the national discussion has gone up and
back, between critics who say that anonymity is a fundamental right of
privacy and necessary for political dissidents, and social networks who
worry about online bullying and impact that trolls have on their
community.
Enough theorizing, there’s actually good evidence to inform the
debate. For 4 years, Koreans enacted increasingly stiff real-name
commenting laws, first for political websites in 2003, then for all
websites receiving more than 300,000 viewers in 2007, and was finally
tightened to 100,000 viewers a year later after online slander was cited
in the suicide of a national figure. The policy, however, was ditched
shortly after
a Korean Communications Commission study found that it only decreased
malicious comments by 0.9%. Korean sites were also inundated by hackers,
presumably after valuable identities.
Further analysis
by Carnegie Mellon’s Daegon Cho and Alessandro Acquisti, found that the
policy actually increased the frequency of expletives in comments for
some user demographics. While the policy reduced swearing and
“anti-normative” behavior at the aggregate level by as much as 30%,
individual users were not dismayed. “Light users”, who posted 1 or 2
comments, were most affected by the law, but “heavy” ones (11-16+
comments ) didn’t seem to mind.
Given that the Commission estimates that only 13% of comments are
malicious, a mere 30% reduction only seems to clean up the muddied
waters of comment systems a depressingly negligent amount.
The finding isn’t surprising” social science researchers have long known that eventually begin to
ignore cameras video taping their behavior. In other words, the presence of some phantom judgmental audience doesn’t seem to make us better versions of ourselves.
