Welcome • User Guide
ToS • Privacy • Canary
Donate • Bugs • License

©2025 Poal.co

632

I think if you intentionally deceive others into thinking you are someone else and then speak in that other person's voice you are in effect forcing that other person to say something they do not want to say.

I see this as a form of compelled speech. In our legal system compelled speech is a violation of the 1st amendment and in general considered a more serious violation than simple censorship.

Preventing someone from saying what they want is bad and infringes on free speech. Forcing someone to say something they don't want to say is even worse.

Based on these thoughts I support making intentional impersonation of another a ban-able offense. I am not talking about parody and I am not talking about mockery. I'm talking about intentional deception that leads people to believe you are some other real, non-fictional, person. I think this is the root problem behind both the recent Ivan vs Ivan issue as well as the entire BRCC thing.

I think if you intentionally deceive others into thinking you are someone else and then speak in that other person's voice you are in effect forcing that other person to say something they do not want to say. I see this as a form of compelled speech. In our legal system compelled speech is a violation of the 1st amendment and in general considered a more serious violation than simple censorship. Preventing someone from saying what they want is bad and infringes on free speech. Forcing someone to say something they don't want to say is even worse. Based on these thoughts I support making intentional impersonation of another a ban-able offense. I am not talking about parody and I am not talking about mockery. I'm talking about intentional deception that leads people to believe you are some other real, non-fictional, person. I think this is the root problem behind both the recent Ivan vs Ivan issue as well as the entire BRCC thing.

(post is archived)

[–] • 7 pts

I’m interested to see what everyone thinks.

[–] • 5 pts

It's a grey area. I have been mock impersonating Lvan so it'd be hypocritical to ban him but not me.

Plus you have to ask yourself what the end goal is here? Ban him and get him to sign up with a new account?

If it becomes enough of a problem with pings and all that I think people will just block him/ban him from their subs. And if he uses default subs or his own, his only recourse is flooding/sliding which is already a bannable offense.

To me it makes sense not to ban him, because it just results in the same behavior under a different username. But if legit users have already gone to the trouble to block the first shill account username, it's an inconvenience for them when he's banned and a new username pops up.

[–] • 4 pts

They are not even in the ‘grey’ area 😂

[–] • 2 pts

the main thing that makes this possible is similarities between certain leters in upper case and lower case nad using this similarity to impersonate each other. A simple fix that most sites do not even bother with is useing a font that clearly has distinct characters for all text characters

the example i used on voat was

I i l L

and if the text in the preview is accurate upper-case i and lower case L use the same vertical line, so any character name that uses either of those 2 characters can be impersonated by substituting the other.

another thing easier to deturmine is a near-match such as using "rn" to imitate an "m" or "lo" for a "b"

these are easy to see if you look close enough. Making the first example a technical impossibility is a good first step, while i have no idea if the second is possible to implement without complexity beyond practical means.

i think its in bad taste to do impersonate anyone like this, but its also a "once bloodied you bleed them dry" mentality of the internet that is very prevalent on the chans and has taken root in voat. as for the penalty of doing this, bans should be the strongest effect, but new account creation should be considered when someone is banned like this. if its free and open, banning one impersonater just makes them make another, hence the sanegoatiswear7999 accounts that were bumping him back up after he gained the ire of voat and was down voted to near 0 and was back up at 10,000 within hours.

hopefully you can see more sides of this multifacited issue than i can. I dont see any easy solutions to this problem.

[–] • 3 pts

Really making the user names have colors pretty much makes it a non issue, changing fonts isn't a bad idea. I'll actually bring that one up with and see what he thinks and if he can think of a font that would help with it.

[–] • 2 pts

This is another reason why I suggested another color bracket for users with less than zero score / negative level. You can spot them very quickly vs. someone impersonating a new user.

[–] [deleted] • 6 pts

At this point it is not a problem but if the site grows like voat then yeah, it's how they squashed sanegoat.

[–] • 3 pts

Good argument, I agree

[–] • 3 pts (edited )

I agree. Impersonating an account should be against Poal TOS. He did the same to me, substituting a capital "I" OwIchemy ... for my small 'L" Owlchemy ... . When I called him on it, he deleted the account. But before doing so he was adding comments attributed to me in threads, as well as posting content. Though my general policy is simply to ignore trolls, when they impersonate someone else, it enters an entirely different realm.

All we have on these anonymous forums is our name recognition. When someone attempts to steal that from you in a clear attempt to destroy it, there deserves to be some consequences. No ... it's not censorship in any way, shape, or form ... said individual is perfectly capable of creating a unique username like anyone else and posting to it.

I agree in full with BuddhasTorch on this ... he said it well.

Edit: here was my suggestion when we were discussing BRCC awhile back ...

[–] • 2 pts

I agree with this post

[–] • 1 pt

Obviously the user name impersonation thing bothers me, and I think its generally a bad thing, it is almost like compelled speech. Its one of the reasons the colored names is such a great feature as it pretty much renders that tactic useless. I am not sure it should be a ban-able offense, but it seems like the only people wanting to do it are either doing it in good fun or breaking the rules anyway.