I am hurt when I think I am hearing words from a fellow citizen that are their own opinion, when instead it is a foreign actor pushing a narrative for their state.

I am all for free speech, but I am not for anonymous speech which is choking the internet. If I am in person speaking with you, I can be fairly certain that you aren't actually a completely different person underneath a rubber mask. I want to at least know that an account I am speaking to is a _person_ and not a robot, although Id probably want country of origin too.

I do not have a good answer for how to achieve that without having a chilling effect on speech, but maybe that's a good thing? I go back and forth on if its better or not to require you to say who you are if you want to say something in public.

In private, go hog wild.

> I am hurt when I think I am hearing words from a fellow citizen that are their own opinion, when instead it is a foreign actor pushing a narrative for their state.

No you are not.

> I am all for free speech, but I am not for anonymous speech which is choking the internet

Then you are not for free speech. Have you ever considered from your point of view that anonymity is incredibly valuable to people who live under an oppressive regime, like Iran or Russia?

> I want to at least know that an account I am speaking to is a _person_ and not a robot, although Id probably want country of origin too.

I too, want many things. That does not give me the right to unveil people who wish to be anonymous. It's pretty wild that this is an opinion on hacker news, of all sites.