The last week has taken me from “I believe in the freedom of online anonymity” to “Online anonymity possess a weight that a moral, civil society cannot bear.”

I do not believe humans are capable of responsibly wielding the power to anonymously connect with millions of people without the real weight of social consequence.

The strongest counterpoint to that is the intense chilling effect that zero anonymity would have on political dissent and discourse that doesn't match the status quo or party line. I feel that would be much more dangerous for our society than occasionally suffering the consequence of some radicalized edge cases.

If you're talking about reactions to the murder of Charlie Kirk, I really don't think anonymity is the problem here, because the opinions I've seen people express anonymously aren't much different to the opinions I've seen people express with their names attached.

If anything, the ones where people have attached their names tend to be a bit more extreme. Maybe attaching your name to something makes it feel more important to signal what group you're in.

Anonymity has no real impact on this. People post heinous things under their full legal names just as readily.

I'd argue if all it took was people saying some mean things anonymously to change your opinion, then your convictions weren't very strong to begin with.

They're unfortunately not much more capable of responsibly connecting with people non-anonymously, I'd say.

See examples like finding someone's employer on LinkedIn to "out" the employee's objectionable behavior, doxxing, or to the extreme, SWATing, etc.

Nice bloody try, guv, I mean "blitz_skull".

Tell me now will ya, who will effect "the real weight of social consequence" over anonymous 1-to-1M connections, other than other humans, the same kind that by your premise are not "capable of responsibly wielding [...] power" over such things?

(Or are there multiple kinds? Eh?)

Would "the real weight of social consequence" work the way you want it to when embodied by a commission? When codified by law? In the form a bot? As crowd? A corp? Me? Nah, you of course.

It's ever telling how the legitimacy of millions of strangers being able to decide the fate of any one individual is hardly ever called into question - only ever the ability of one to talk back.

And this is how we get things like TSA and Patriot Act.

"I was totally in favor of freedom, until one bad thing happened, and now I think freedom should never have existed in the first place!"

What a bizarre conclusion given the multiple high profile individuals and politicians who overtly and directly called for violent oppression and civil war against their political enemies on the last week.

If the internet is in fact "the largest social media platform", then anonymity absolutely has to go as my public-facing telemetry server [0] based on DNS as a transport, and not rooted to the ICANN DNS tree, gets 1000+ abusive requests for every legitimate one. I'm supposed to return REFUSED to each and every one [1] of them (not drop them) and I'm not supposed to publish the IP addresses involved. Granted they could be spoofed, but the only way we'll ever know is to go ahead and publish so that a global picture can be developed and the owners of the addresses can tell us that they're being spoofed.

[0] One of the pieces of telemetry is the addresses abusing the server.

[1] I, and many other operators violate this stability requirement and drop traffic. [2]

[2] There are no internet police. If there were then BCP 38 would be enforced and this particular problem would largely go away.

Moreover it’s not even possible for us to engage in _honest debate_ about the impact of social media anymore.

Absolutist positions without nuance are the norm, and the folks who control these platforms control to a very large extent the narrative to push surrounding them, both directly through the platforms themselves and indirectly through lobbying and the obscene pool of capital they have siphoned off.

I'm making 2 assumptions here: that you're American and that you're referring to the recent assassination. What I find odd is that American history is packed with assassinations and domestic terrorism and yet it is this recent event that has affected your thinking. In your own parlance, what gives?

Are you talking about the Charlie Kirk thing? What does that have to do with online anonymity? They caught the shooter.

Would you require identification to copy and tape up a bunch of fliers around town?

Anonymity is necessary sometimes in my opinion.

Why is that? Some irony as well that you're posting anonymously. Are you comfortable giving us your identification right now?

I don’t think it has much to do with being named. It’s the assumption that most people have that what they’re reading is being said by someone whose opinion they would actually value if they knew them.

Disclosing names wouldn’t help. People actually knowing the person would help.

Plenty of people are perfectly willing to be publicly despicable online in their social media accounts, using their real names. Pretty easy to find them.

The problem is the leaders of the large social media organizations do not care about the consequences of their platforms enough to change how they operate. They're fine with hosting extremist and offensive content, and allowing extremists to build large followings using their platforms. Heck, they even encourage it!

No offence but if you’re swing between two poles like this in such a short time you probably haven’t considered the topic deeply enough and for long enough.

Anonymity can be very powerful for marginalised groups and it can be abused by trolls. Its value is contextual and not some simple good/bad dichotomy.

Successfully integrating technology into society is, like most political topics, complicated, requires a nuanced understanding of issues and a willingness to find compromise and less than perfect solutions. Sadly the political system (and the side in power now particularly) is increasingly offering moral absolutes and simplifications.

what happened?

Really? With people being tracked down and fired for expressing their political views, it seems like online anonymity is more important than ever.

Or better yet, we need some kind some zero knowledge doodad which enforces scarcity of anonymous handles such that a given voice is provably a member of your same congressional district, or state, or zip code, or whatever, and is known to not be spinning up new identities all willy nilly like, but can't be identified more precisely than that.

We don’t have a moral or civil society anyway; we can’t even prosecute Trumps numerous illegal actions (even when convicted!). Can’t get the Epstein files. Can’t even point out Charlie Kirk was not a great person (while politicians said nothing about the school shooting the same day), and where it’s legal to kill 40,000 of us a year due to poor medical coverage so we can prop up the stock.

I’m not sure, given the moral dystopia we currently inhabit, what positive benefit would accrue from removing online anonymity?