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The greatest damage ever done by speech (i.e. motivation to start wars, genocides) has been done by fully identifiable people. Anonymous online speech is a tota
by bigDinosaur 4y ago
The greatest damage ever done by speech (i.e. motivation to start wars, genocides) has been done by fully identifiable people. Anonymous online speech is a total red herring. All current major threats are due to fully non-anonymous people doing bad things (e.g. Putin, heads of cartels, the current head of $terrorist_group), not anonymous online commenters.
Conversely, one of the greatest threat to authoritarians is speech that cannot be easily traced. Hard to put you in prison (or cross international borders to kill or capture or threaten you) if you're anonymous.
What if your online comment is discussing the latest example of police corruption you've seen in your local PD? That would be a very local example of where not being anonymous may easily threaten you, but being anonymous can still let others start investigating.
- jay_kyburz 4y agoYou could tell the "investigators" directly and anonymously. That way if your comment about police corruption was not true, nobody would be fired for no reason. That is precisely the point. No point discussing the speech of criminals like Putin, lies are just the tip of the iceberg.
- sofixa 4y ago> The greatest damage ever done by speech (i.e. motivation to start wars, genocides) has been done by fully identifiable people I think your information might be out of date. The Rohingya genocide is a good example of a modern genocide incited on Facebook by regular humans and bots. In modern cases such as Brexit, Trump, various far right candidates (Zemmour, Bolsonaro), a massive amount of people/fake people on social media talking about them, their talking points (ludicrous and false as they are) have brought them their success, despite the obvious massive red flags.