Authors Respond to "The Silent Revolution (Part 2)" on Online Anonymity

In our prior post, we discussed at length a paper entitled “Anonymity and Identity Online”. The authors of that paper - Florian Ederer, Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham, and Kyle Jensen - have responded to our post. Their response is available here:

https://florianederer.github.io/response-rauh-kearney.html

Briefly to their points, we did base our comments on the latest version of their paper of October 25, 2023. Further to their enumerated items:

1.) We appreciate the attempt to clarify on the “hacking” point; however, we still maintain our initial characterization of the methods in the paper and our example of breaking a bike lock to the make the point. Our understanding is that this method is very similar to the methods detailed here.

2.) We’re glad to hear that the authors are not interested in identifying specific posters, even if they are making available data and code to help others who wish to do so. We had another impression of their intentions from their public posts on social media. See here or below. We maintain that if their aim were not to identify specific posters, we would find it odd to exhibit this sort of behavior in the aftermath of initially posting the first abstract of the paper.

3.) We did NOT in fact say that we definitively know that the authors or anyone else deliberately misled the IRB in getting its support in allowing the study to move forward. We do note that IRBs routinely hold up innocuous projects for all sorts of reasons, and thus it remains strange that Yale’s IRB would allow for this study to commence knowing that the authors would have the ability to identify specific posters (which they seem to assert in the tweet above).

4.) While it is heartening to hear the authors’ assert that these are best methods to date to do this sort of analysis, we leave it to readers to decide based on the examples we provide whether the methods used are sufficiently good to say anything meaningful about “toxicity”.

5.) We maintain that the analyzed subreddits (which the authors refer to here as “cherrypicked”) have much more in common with the type of content one would find on EJMR. We stand by our initial point that the top 1000 subreddits include too many topics that would never touch on anything remotely controversial (e.g., r/cats, r/gardening etc.) to serve as useful points of comparison to EJMR.

6.) We appreciate the clarification on the double counting of posts.