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But without his first name, wouldn't it be less likely that people find his full name and spread it? You can't have your cake and eat it too. If you're going to post his first name, you should expect that people could find his full name. If your theory of liability states that you would be responsible for harassment if you posted his full name due to the actions of third parties, then why does the same not apply for his first name?
In fact, I thought this was the point of the "signal boosting=doxing" argument. Were Franco not signal boosted, he wouldn't have been doxed, right? That implies that in an ideal world, to prevent his doxing, we ought not criticise him.
Then the next thing you say (that you don't need a name at all to criticise someone's ideas) seems to take the position that posting any name does mean you are responsible. So I am still confused.
Ok. Let's see what this would look like.
"I believe racism is bad." I don't think most reasonable people would disagree, so this is a vacuous statement.
"I believe racist jokes are bad." Also vacuous.
"I believe this one particular joke is racist." Well there are many racist jokes, which one are you talking about?
"I believe the following joke: '(FILL IN THE BLANK)' is racist." So we did it, right? We managed to criticise the racism without using the person's name?
Not so fast. The problem is that it's easy to find whoever said something based on the content of their speech alone. You seem to be advocating for a practice known as subtweeting (or with the advent of Bluesky, one might call it "subskeeting" (eugh)), and it doesn't work. Here's a good recent example.
Hbomberguy posted the following:
Almost everyone recognized, correctly, that he was talking about Patricia Taxxon, despite the fact that Hbomb did not name him at all.
So the bigger your following, the more liability you bear, and the more speech of yours you have to suppress in order to not be liable for harassment? Isn't that a perverse incentive against having an audience, and wouldn't that also result in many suppressing their speech in order to not grow too big? I still think that consistently following this principle would end up prohibiting a lot of innocuous speech. Not everyone who gets criticised on the Internet is going to face doxing or harassment, but under your argument, it seems that the mere potential of harms committed by third parties (who we have no control over) is enough that we should not criticise people at all.
No, I shouldn't expect that. The lesson of Scott's post is that making something easier matters. He's even posted about this in other contexts, for instance beware trivial inconveniences. In fact, I've even complained in another context about this "rationalist" idea very recently.
Even if it is in fact true that someone could do X, and your own actions were not necessary for them to do X, making things easier still makes you responsible. It doesn't matter that someone else could use the first name to find the full name; posting the full name (including posting it behind the scenes to "business leaders") and posting the first name are not equivalent actions. This concept seems to be foreign to a lot of "rationalists".
There are degrees of harm. Posting the full name harms more than posting the first name, which in turns harms more than saying "a guy I know".
Then maybe he shouldn't have said anything (unless Taxxon is a public figure). Sometimes acting in an ethical manner means not doing things you want to do or not doing things that benefit yourself.
If you mean moral liability, absolutely.
Whether you call it an incentive is a matter of semantics, but it's not something you can choose to do or not do in the same way you can choose to do or not do most incentives. Ethical conclusions just are; if people avoid some actions that benefit themselves so that they don't behave unethically, that doesn't make the unethical things ethical.
This sounds fine in theory. In practice, I'm not sure it makes a difference. If you post the content of a tweet but blur out the name, it's not that much harder to find the original author (depending on which tweet you post). And if the entire point of these ethics is to prevent bad actors from harassing people, do you really think those bad actors would just give up when they see a blurred name? If they want to harass people, they are motivated enough to do it anyway. The only way to escape responsibility is to not post anything at all, akin to the Copenhagen interpretation of ethics.
I'll give another example. Let's say there's a forum out there where people are allowed to discuss suicide and how to achieve it in detail. Let's say you're a mildly successful musical British-Irish Youtuber who stumbles upon the existence of the forum and want to campaign against it, but you also subscribe to this theory of ethics and you could never in good conscience make the forum more notable than it already is, as you believe that you would be responsible for more suicides if you did that. How do you report on the forum without inadvertently promoting it to more suicidal people?
Your theory goes that he would be in the clear (or at least cause less harm) by doing the following:
So does this work? The answer is a resounding no.
Tantacrul's video on Sanctioned Suicide did all these things. He called it "Sorrow Solution", he never used actual screenshots (save for one censored screenshot) and he made up fake names for everyone. In the wake of his video, the number of visits to the site actually significantly increased in a way that the website operators noticed. It's not even clear at all that the number of visits in the aftermath was less than if Tantacrul had been upfront and used the site's real name instead of "Sorrow Solution". It's very likely that a majority of the visits came from suicidal people (or even curious people) who watched Tantacrul's video and decided to look for themselves. If someone is motivated enough to commit suicide, they're not going to let a silly thing like the "Sorrow Solution" name replacement stop them. The forum even got its own Wikipedia article after this. It turns out that you can't report on the forum without promoting it. (Also, his recreated screenshots only served as an avenue for further misrepresentation of the site, but that's another discussion.)
So again, it seems like the most ethical thing to do in the face of a forum where people teach others how to commit suicide is... nothing. Or at least not to make a Youtube video on it, I suppose.
He is. So is it fine (or less harmful) to criticise public figures?
It's not clear to me that Hbomberguy's skeet benefited him. Being anti-lolicon may win you the support of fellow anti-lolicons, but most people are already against lolicon anyway, and the ones who are in favour are fierce advocates who will target you with nasty tactics (e.g. calling you a pedophile) for being against it.
It's not clear to me that being a critic in general benefits the critic. (Unless it's movie criticism and you're Roger Ebert, I suppose.) The primary benefactor of criticism is the one who is criticised, so they can take the feedback and improve. If I didn't care at all about someone and at least have some sense of respect for them, I wouldn't criticise them. I would just not say anything.
The entire point that I've making over several posts is that "it's not that much harder to" is bad reasoning. Making something harder or easier can drastically change the way people react to it, even though they "could always have done the same thing anyway".
That's easy, you decide whether reporting on the forum helps more lives (by getting it shut down) or harms more lives (by making the suicidal know about it).
The question of naming the forum as doxing doesn't come up because you want to harm the forum. You are not unintentionally enabling harm, you are causing harm deliberately!
(Now, you do need to be right about it being okay to harm the forum. People tend not to be right about such things, but that's a separate issue. There's also the issue of weakening social norms even if it's to help people in one case.)
Cancelling someone for an out of context remark posted twenty years ago won't benefit you, yet that sort of thing happens anyway. People "benefit" by enjoying the act of harming others for socially acceptable reaosons.
I can agree, but I think it depends on the specifics. I brought up Sanctioned Suicide because I think not naming the forum made no difference whatsoever in terms of the number of suicidal people who now know that it exists. Not just "it was harder to find out what site it was," I think it made zero difference and the level of difficulty was the same as if he had just named it outright.
Besides that, I'm hesitant to agree with your principle in all cases because it seems quite easy to shift blame from one party to another party who it does not make sense to hold accountable. One of your examples was "I didn't intend for my cryptocurrency to be used for money laundering" and, well, that reminds me of GrapheneOS.
A while back, European governments verbally attacked GrapheneOS (and even Pixel phones, which is the only way to run it*) as an enabler of pedophiles, because the police found it effectively impossible to break the security features of GrapheneOS. Under your set of ethics, GrapheneOS is responsible for the abuse of their system by pedophiles. In fact the argument is stronger because while pedophiles are highly motivated, they are unlikely to be able to code the security features on their own. But I don't agree. First, because there is no feasible way for GrapheneOS to prevent pedophiles from using their system without also harming everyone else, since any system that supposedly does so will inherently weaken the security of GrapheneOS. If police can break in, so can hackers. Second, because it's just not their responsibility!
(I'm not saying service providers, intermediaries, developers etc. can never be morally responsible for abuse committed by others. For example, if you're a platform like Discord or Roblox, you are enabling pedophilia the minute you receive a credible report of someone being a pedophile and fail to ban them. The difference here is the ability to ban specific people without affecting innocents, and having knowledge of someone being a pedophile.)
*There is a Motorola model in development, but it hasn't come out yet.
Well, yes, this was a given. My point was that naming the forum would harm others, namely, suicidal people who (the theory goes) would not have committed suicide otherwise.
It depends on what you mean by "responsible". I certainly think that when determining whether GrapheneOS is a good or bad thing, you need to consider and weigh the fact that it makes things easier for pedophiles, even if you ultimately decide that the good it does is greater.
Which is the same basic thing: in deciding whether it's good to name the forum, you need to consider and weigh that it makes suicide easier. You should not say "well, people could have committed suicide even if I didn't make it easy, so I can just ignore that completely".
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