#60 – Véliz on How to Improve Online Speech with Pseudonymity

Algocracy and Transhumanism Podcast

In this episode I talk to Carissa Véliz. Carissa is a Research Fellow at the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics and the Wellcome Centre for Ethics and Humanities at the University of Oxford. She works on digital ethics, practical ethics more generally, political philosophy, and public policy. She is also the Director of the research programme ‘Data, Privacy, and the Individual’ at the IE’s Center for the Governance of Change’. We talk about the problems with online speech and how to use pseudonymity to address them.

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Show Notes

• 0:00 – Introduction
• 1:25 – The problems with online speech
• 4:55 – Anonymity vs Identifiability
• 9:10 – The benefits of anonymous speech
• 16:12 – The costs of anonymous speech – The online Ring of Gyges
• 23:20 – How digital platforms mediate speech and make things worse
• 28:00 – Is speech more trustworthy when the speaker is identifiable?
• 30:50 – Solutions that don’t work
• 35:46 – How pseudonymity could address the problems with online speech
• 41:15 – Three forms of pseudonymity and how they should be used
• 44:00 – Do we need an organisation to manage online pseudonyms?
• 49:00 – Thoughts on the Journal of Controversial Ideas
• 54:00 – Will people use pseudonyms to deceive us?
• 57:30 – How pseudonyms could address the issues with un-PC speech
• 1:02:04 – Should we be optimistic or pessimistic about the future of online speech?

Relevant Links

• Carissa’s Webpage
• “Online Masquerade: Redesigning the Internet for Free Speech Through the Use of Pseudonyms” by Carissa
• “Why you might want to think twice about surrendering online privacy for the sake of convenience” by Carissa
• “What If Banks Were the Main Protectors of Customers’ Private Data?” by Carissa
• The Secret Barrister
• Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger
• Mill’s Argument for Free Speech: A Guide
• ‘Here Comes the Journal of Controversial Ideas. Cue the Outcry‘ by Bartlett