> To use an analogy: if the village idiot went to the town square and shouted hate speech, he'd be laughed at or dealt with. Now anyone has a platform to go to

> To use an analogy: if the village idiot went to the town square and shouted hate speech, he'd be laughed at or dealt with. Now anyone has a platform to go to the town square, except it's the world, and shout hate speech. And unlike before there will be hateful people, some of them unrecognisable from real people, who will support the village idiot. They will help amplify his voice and validate him and legitimise him. As usual the problem is the commoner idiot, not the group of sociopaths that now have the means to astroturf their agendas efficiently. Especially puzzling since this submission is about exactly the latter. > We have to find a way to stop this. The only thing I can think of is require you to attach your real identity to social media accounts, and regulate the living daylights out of it to hold the networks accountable if their owners don't want to do the right thing. Free speech isn't free. Think harder then. The village idiot could move and reinvent himself as a respectable fellow. Basically, pre-digital we naturally had different personas; there was no Panopticon that could ever hope to know all our associations. Digital tools have changed that. And inventing the fiction of “one single persona” to tie back to what you said five years ago, ten years ago, thirty years ago, is a terrible idea, and I would argue (based on intuition) very unnatural.