7 ms·

Banning anonymous social media accounts = good for authoritarian governments and corporations

• myfavoritedog 5y ago
  Authoritarian governments run troll farms that plague social media through anonymous accounts.
• smolder 5y ago
  "Anonymous" social media accounts can be tied back to a real person already a lot of the time. People are terrible about "doxing" themselves in places where pseudonyms are used. (Usually that's fine, since nobody is really out to get them and the sleuthing takes work.) In the case of certain governments, the account owner is likely identifiable near 100% of the time, with not much effort. Depending on what social media we're talking about, (and what corporations,) there may be corporations assembling pseudonym to identity mappings, too. Making a law that forbids anonymity does help authoritarians, but it's mostly formalizing what is already an unspoken rule: that you can't truly be anonymous online. Other parties can throw away knowledge of you, like logless VPNs or TOR, but its next to impossible to verify they really do that.