• 1ostA5tro6yne
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    44 months ago

    what’s your solution for people who troll and harass and then hop to a different IP and spin up a new account the moment they find out they’re banned?

    • @kava@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      Like I said, you would use both browser fingerprinting and IP address to identify people. So hopping IP addresses wouldn’t be enough by itself. If you’re curious about how browser fingerprinting works, there’s this neat website: https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/ where you can test your browser. It’s a fairly accurate way to track people across the internet. A dedicated person could bypass these systems, but a dedicated person is also more likely to be aware of shadowbanning.

      Shadowbanning is most likely to affect people who don’t understand a lot about how the technology and systems of a social media site work.

      After a certain point, you just have to accept that there will be some trolls that bypass the system but it’s not worth finding 100% of them because you’ll catch a lot of regular people in the process. There’s that famous statement with the criminal justice system “better 10 criminals go free than 1 innocent man go to jail”

      • 1ostA5tro6yne
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        24 months ago

        that’s really interesting, thanks for the link and the writeup!

        • @kava@lemmy.world
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          4 months ago

          no prob. the fingerprinting thing is actually quite common. many popular websites have code on them from big companies like Google & Facebook that will check for browser fingerprints so that they can track you across the internet.

          for example some website that is a blog about corgis wants to use google analytics. so they copy paste the google analytics code onto their html. that way they can get all sorts of useful statistics about who is visiting their website, how long they stay, etc. but Google doesn’t do this for free out of altruism - google makes sure that every user that goes onto your website now gets tracked.

          so using browser fingerprinting, google knows you visited the corgi blog website even though they don’t own that website and you never used Google to click on it.

          basically the whole internet has these types of trackers. so google and facebook know your interests, your porn preferences, your health issues, etc all sorts of interesting things just by things like browser fingerprints.

          there are ways around this, although it’s an ever-increasing arms race between privacy activists & companies like Google/Facebook