
J.Nathan Matias takes a clear-eyed look at The Real Name Fallacy, the belief that forcing users to communicate using real names will improve online conduct. In my experience, the biggest problems come on platforms like Twitter where it’s a mix of real and pseudonymous users.
After the U.S. government published a report on Russia’s cyber attacks against the U.S. election system, and included a list of computers that were allegedly used by Russian hackers, I became curious if any of these hackers had visited my personal blog. The U.S. report, which boasted of including “technical details regarding the tools and infrastructure used by Russian civilian and military intelligence services,” came with a list of 876 suspicious IP addresses used by the hackers, and these addresses were the clues I needed to, in the end, understand a gaping weakness in the report.

“These aren’t the statements of someone who’s interested in getting to the bottom of this.”

Two weeks ago I published an analysis of the images of Syria used by the British FCO on Twitter. My analysis found that the FCO employs images that resonate with iconic moments from British history. In addition, I found that these images are an integral part of the British narrative of events in Syria.
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