When requesting a user's identity, add an optional "intro message" field to send with the notification.

[fabacab]

Would it be useful to allow users who request the identity of an author to attach an introductory message that will get sent to the author along with the Facebook notification?

[unquietpirate]

Sure, why not. How would it be sent? Attached to the notification somehow, or via the FB messaging system?

It occurs to me, also, that this would give people the opportunity to decide whether or not they actually want to send an identity request. One thing I noticed yesterday is that the "Someone else wrote this" link looks identical for both public and pseudonymous identities -- which means I don't know until I click it whether or not I'm sending someone a notification that I was reading their story. This has caused me to avoid clicking the link on several occasions, since I'm interested in having the author revealed to me if it's public but don't want to notify anyone about my activities.

[fabacab]

The notification text itself is length-limited by Facebook to 180 characters at most. I'm not sure if this is long enough. The only other way to send an introductory message is to let the requester compose a message but send it from the app to the reporter's email address, so that the requester doesn't see who it's being sent to. It seems like it used to be possible to directly message a Facebook user from a Facebook app, but Facebook disabled that behavior because it was abused by spammers, of course. However, this also requires asking PAT-FB users to give us their Facebook-associated email address, and I'm not certain how comfortable I am with that.

Also, the "Someone else wrote this" link was intentionally designed identically regardless of the report's identity privacy setting. I wanted to make sure that if you had to think about whether you were comfortable with the other person knowing you've requested their identity before you did so. In other words, you cannot request someone's identity without possibly sending them a notification, but you can never guess if this is going to happen, so your ability to "lurk" while receiving more information than the author wanted to provide is curtailed. This helps shift the psychological burden on the reader, not the writer, of the report, and since by definition most readers will not be mutual survivors, I feel this is a good compromise.

Do you agree?

[fabacab]

The other concern with sending an introductory message is that if it ever leaves the Facebook ecosystem, such as through email, it becomes more vulnerable to wholesale Internet surveillance such as that from the NSA. In other words, sending an email as a notification de-facto reveals both the reporter and requester's identities to email service providers and any intermediary server on the Internet. Not sure how much that "really matters," but we are talking about potentially deadly situations and security seems important to consider….

[unquietpirate]

However, this also requires asking PAT-FB users to give us their Facebook-associated email address, and I'm not certain how comfortable I am with that.

Agreed. I'd rather not ask for peoples' e-mail addresses or any other identifying info beyond what already exists on their Facebook. (Also, who on Earth even checks their Facebook-associated e-mail address?) If there's no convenient way to send an intro message via channels internal to Facebook, I'd prefer not to do it at all.

you can never guess if this is going to happen, so your ability to "lurk" while receiving more information than the author wanted to provide is curtailed.

Cool. As an intentional design choice, I like that line of thinking.

[fabacab]

Well, so, we can do a Twitter-like thing where we offer the requester the ability to write a SUPER short message and basically customize the Facebook notification, but that's like, literally writing a "tweet"-length thing. I'm still not clear on whether or not this would be useful or if the length is simply too constrained to be useful in this context.

[unquietpirate]

Well, my first thought was that writing an intro message would allow someone who doesn't yet feel comfortable writing a report about their abuser to still message someone else who had and say something like, "Hey, this person did something bad to me too and I don't feel okay writing about it on the public Internet but I'd like to connect with you if you wanna talk about it." I mean, essentially, it allows a user to send a private message to another survivor without needing to know that survivor's identity.

But a) I don't think there's any way the length of the Facebook notification could be sufficient for that and b) being able to send a private messages to someone without knowing their identity opens up avenues for cyberbullying that I'm not sure I'm comfortable with e.g. an abuser could read a report written about them and then send a threatening message to the author, even though the author wanted to keep their identity private.

• shrug * There are pros and cons. The problem is that any technology that allows survivors to connect privately also increases avenues for abusers to threaten survivors privately. That's kind of one of those built-in structural things we can't do anything about, similar to everything being public on the Internet. My main reason for not implementing this would be that it sounds like a technological hassle.

[fabacab]

It wouldn't be a technological hassle, it's just a matter of whether or not the capability is weighted more heavily to the behavior we want to encourage or not. And from this discussion, it sounds like the answer is "no," so I feel good closing this as "won't fix" now.