Reply #624: That's true.

[casstheturtle]

However, I've also never yet encountered a situation where I wanted to meet someone, and they mysteriously refused to meet me, either. Given the amount of people I've gone into RL contact with after meeting them first online, I still suspect that means something. If it does not mean something about people online in general, it seems to mean something about my methods of discerning real people.

I'm also, obviously, not talking about spammers. I'm talking about people I met through political discussion groups on assorted topics, often topics in which a person's identity mattered. I've seen a small number of people who turned up fake, but I still default to assuming someone's genuine.

Why do I do this? It's not because I'm so naive as to believe everyone online is honest. You can't last over fifteen years online, read the notorious stories, find a few fake online personas in your own communities, and still believe that's the case.

However, I look at the numbers, and I look at the possible harm done.

As far as numbers go, the fake people are occasional. The fake people who aren't doing spamming or drive-by trolling are even more occasional than that. So, most people seem to be real. Probably a few who seem to be, aren't, but that's a few.

Then there's the possible harm done.

Assuming by default that people are fake:

You can end up chasing a lot of real people off who are not fake, who may have serious reasons for wanting or needing to be involved in certain discussions, but who also have a serious need for privacy or anonymity.

You can also get people so obsessed with rooting out the fakes that they end up stalking and harassing people they consider to be fake. The results to this for the people regarded as fake can range from as little as hurt feelings to as much as putting their lives in danger by doing things like consolidating personal details about them and posting them in places that will bring them harm. If the people regarded as fake are doing serious work, whether to effect change or to make money, it can impede their work by needlessly destroying their reputations.

You can also end up with a culture of so much suspicion that real communication becomes impossible. People close down. People get scared off by the requirements of proving who they are. People who are trying to escape abusive situations (which can be part of some political work) can end up fearing that their abusers will find it easier to find them, when so much more information is required to be put out there. People who would otherwise have a lot to contribute, stop contributing. Dissenters will speak out less, even when their ideas are badly needed.

It can also create a situation where people don't have to take others' experiences into account, they can just say "You're not real," and leave it at that. This in turn creates a situation where experiences that are outside the norms of that community are less tolerated, and even experiences inside the norms can be considered suspicious rather than important.

A person would think that real fakers would get caught more easily in this kind of environment, but it's not always accurate. Quite often, what the online fakers will do, is become the most gung-ho about finding "fake" people, and will successfully disrupt entire forums and communities, and disrupt friendships and alliances as well, in their quest to "out" perfectly real people as fake.

Assuming by default that other people are real:

The only really bad effect this would have, is that people who were not real would not be under immediate suspicion. Whether or not that ended up harming people would depend on what the fake people were up to. I've known self-confessed fake people who don't actually disrupt forums in any way whatsoever. On the other hand, I've known fake people who do their damndest to disrupt forums and communities. Sort of like real people, really, only they hide behind an assumed online persona to do it. And assuming by default that other people are real, does not have to mean tolerating situations that ought not to be tolerated, and does not have to mean that people will never be noticed to be fake.

The good effects on the other hand, basically involve the absence of all the destructive effects of considering people either fake, or suspected fake, that I outlined above.

Because of this, I'd rather give people the benefit of the doubt. The effects of assuming that people are fake, are more damaging to a larger amount of people, than assuming that people are real. Much like, as I've pointed out, the welfare system. You always hear about scammers, but they're not as common as people who are getting it for real reasons, and the majority suffers because of being assumed constantly to be freeloading scammers. Aside from which, the amount of money you get for "freeloading" is so little that a person has to be pretty economically desperate to try it in the first place, as just about anyone who's actually had to live on what the system provides could tell you.

So, yeah, my example wasn't the greatest one, but on the other hand for whatever reason I really haven't encountered people being evasive when I've wanted to meet up with them. Of course, I never decide to do that until I've known someone awhile, and there's other factors there. But even if I'm just really lucky, I still think the people who are fake are in the minority, and while fakers can wreak havoc on communities, I think that paranoia and the stalking and near-stalking behavior that the obsessive hunt for fakers can cause, are far more damaging to communities overall and the people in them. And I certainly don't want to see a world online, including in the political world, where most people (or most n00bs, or most dissenters) are not listened to about their personal experiences because they might be fake.