ID for social media accounts will only put the most vulnerable at risk

The racist abuse suffered by England’s Black footballers has once again posed questions about how to tackle the problem. Everyone seems to have a solution. Most are poorly thought-out, and likely to do more harm than good.

More than 600,000 of us have thrown our weight behind a petition launched in September 2020 by Katie Price designed to tackle the abuse her disabled son, Harvey, faces online.

It is – of course – abhorrent that Harvey Price faces anonymous insults for his disabilities, just as it’s abhorrent that England’s football players, who brought us to the finals of a tournament for the first time in decades, have faced abuse for their single failure within a summer of success.

But the petition, and its demand that all users must provide some form of identification, is another example of people not thinking long enough about the problem and the potentially more significant ramifications their supposed “solution” would cause.

If you have no problem using your real name on the internet, you’re one of the lucky ones. You’re in a privileged position where you’re either unlikely to face many brickbats, or you’re able to shrug them off. But you’re one of the few. And it’s important you acknowledge that.

Anonymity is a right we grant to whistleblowers, to victims, and to those who live in fear of reprisals. Ironically, it’s a requirement that many of those who are most marginalised in our society – the same ethnic minorities and disabled people who are subject to the worst abuse – cherish most online.

My partner works with charities who support victims of domestic violence and who are on the fringes of society. Some of these women require anonymity to escape the predatory behaviour of current or former partners. Some have been forced, because they’ve had to flee their homes, to engage in work in the underground economy, including sex work, to survive. In order to try and re-enter the traditional world of work, they require the ability to use a pseudonym online – something that the knee-jerk reaction we’re seeing would destroy.

“If you’ve got nothing to hide, there should be no problem giving your ID up,” those in support of the idea say. Yet they do so from a place of privilege, and a narrow world viewpoint that seems unable to consider the many reasons people may need to remain anonymous.

Yet there isn’t a simple solution. If you think you can solve several centuries of racism with an answer you’ve conjured up in the shower in the last few days, you aren’t thinking about the problem anywhere near hard enough. Those who have devoted years of their professional lives to developing policy and researching the science and theory behind this haven’t yet come up with a solution.

This isn’t a tech problem alone: this is a societal problem. Social media isn’t the root cause of racism. Society is. And stopping people being anonymous won’t stop racism, as those who saw tweets posted from the account of a Savills estate agent employee – which had the account owner’s real name attached – earlier this week will know. (The account owner claims he was hacked, and has been suspended by his employer pending an investigation.)

Anonymity doesn’t stop racists being racist. Anyone who has heard whispers in pubs, monkey chants on football terraces, or has heard an indiscreet uncle bore on at a family gathering knows that. Racists and abusers often don’t think twice about attaching their real name to their worst thoughts.

But anonymity does stop those who are most at risk in our society from being able to interact with large parts of it. Social media has become our public forum. Imagine you were asked to provide your ID every time you entered a café, a library or a shop. Suddenly you’d feel uncomfortable.

It’s an ill-thought out idea that has already been proposed and quashed in plenty of other countries. South Korea’s constitutional court called it an idea that would result in “treating all citizens as potential criminals”. For five years from 2007 to 2012, the requirement for South Korean websites to collect national identification numbers smothered free speech and normal online life with a pillow. Some websites saw a 95 per cent drop-off in activity as people felt unwilling to speak.

Those in favour of requiring people to use their ID have suggested it doesn’t need to be public; just shared with the social media platforms. But as revelations in a book about Facebook published this week allege, trusting social media platforms with your data isn’t a guarantee it’ll be kept safe. It is claimed that Facebook’s engineers used their power and access to spy on exes. If you can’t imagine the fear some face when being asked to give their real names to anyone, you need to expand your social circle and view of the world.

These demands also overlook the fact that most people can be identified by police even if they’re anonymous – if they need to be. Research shows Twitter users can be identified with 96.7 per cent accuracy just by the metadata – contextual information – surrounding their posts.

The solution isn’t to require the most vulnerable in society to give up their last shred of protection to stop racists. The solution is to teach racists not to be horrible people. And to demand the police do better to stop them.