Social Platform Trust & Safety

Proactive Solutions to Tech-Facilitated Gender-Based Violence

For example, you can send anonymous messages. You can anonymously DM somebody and you can send an anonymous message in a group. This is a format that has historically been really fun and people really like, but it inevitably falls apart because somebody gets bullied and kills themselves. For Daze, you'll be able to send anonymous messages, but... See more

If we want to protect the rights of real people, it should be much harder to take away someone’s account and online property. But that only works if we have a way to know which accounts belong to a real and specific human with an authentic connection to the community. That implies more stringent validation requirements to get and keep an account.

We can immediately rule out reproducing the current system in which a tiny number of companies govern permissible speech and what safety means for billions of people. We don't want social media that's like Twitter except without a demented owner. You cannot fix social media by having a non-profit run it or by guiding it with some ethical principles... See more

Facebook Groups also allow moderators to remain anonymous, despite the platform otherwise requiring “real names.” While anonymity is not a panacea for harassment—many harassers in our study used their real names—it makes it possible for public figures to evade responsibility for engaging in hate or harassment.