Yesterday Elon Musk spoke at a Twitter Space intended to calm advertisers nervous about its verification plans on the platform it recently acquired. The hour-long conversation between Musk and Robin Wheeler of the Twitter advertising team was wide-ranging: he laid out plans for some kind of payment system and explained why auto advertisers shouldn’t worry.
For the most part, he focused on explaining his vision for an $8-per-month Twitter Blue subscription and verification system. “I am wrestling with the question of how to deal with millions of bots and troll farms, including malicious state actors,” Chief Twit said.
Wheeler asked him about content moderation and brand safety, specifically hate speech (advertisers, for good reason, don’t want their ads running alongside hate speech). Musk said that this would be resolved with the $8 paywall. “Someone’s propensity to engage in hate speech if they’ve paid $8 and are risking their account,” Musk said. “Think about it… how much hate speech do you encounter if you are at a party or at an event?”
Unfortunately, Musk is dead wrong.
He is falling in love with a old fallacy that if people use their real names online, they won’t say terrible things. Anyone who has ever watched boomers in a local Buy Nothing Facebook group knows that people have no problem saying nasty things under their real names.
Musk’s plan also runs counter to several academic studies on online behavior. An acquaintance 2016 study from the University of Zurich showed that using real names actually makes people more likely to post hateful and aggressive comments. One of the reasons for this is that the people who were trolling felt the approval of their peers.
Making people use real names has also been shown to fail on a large scale. In 2007, in an effort to reduce cyber bullying, South Korea passed a law requiring real names for commenters on large websites. the law was scrapped in 2012in part because one study showed that it only reduced aggressive comments by less than 1%.
