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If you wouldn’t make a political statement in a town hall setting where you’re going to show ID, then you probably shouldn’t say it on the internet. But keep i
by k33n 6mo ago
If you wouldn’t make a political statement in a town hall setting where you’re going to show ID, then you probably shouldn’t say it on the internet.
But keep in mind that these laws don’t result in your identity being public. They will ultimately result in the sites you’re posting on know that you’re an enumerated individual. The ultimate benefit as I see it is removing outsized leverage over public opinion by botting likes on your statement or otherwise operating tons of accounts. It should also eliminate threats of violence from the digital public square, since building a prosecution pipeline against those would be easy to do. Same with child grooming, but I’ll acknowledge there’s a way to make that argument in a glib way, as an excuse to realize some of the other goals. It is a real problem though.
- DangitBobby 6mo agoI disagree. I won't repeat my comment, but it carries all the information you need to know.
- domador 6mo agoAs with many detractors of anonymity, it seems that you're assuming that the authorities and neighbors you'll deal with will always be virtuous, and not corrupt nor vindictive toward opponents. Maybe you'd like to expose the town's government's corruption or mismanagement at the town hall, but the town is run by a family with a lot of influence and power over everything that happens within the town. You live in the town, fear for your safety, and have no good way of anonymously opposing their corruption, so you stay silent and they get to keep their power. I don't see how these laws wouldn't make your identity public to someone, even if it's not the public at large. But it'd be enough for that someone to be an individual or entity who turns out to be interested in silencing your voice. Their knowledge of your identity would probably give them power to silence you not only on their platform but also on other platforms, if access to those other platforms is also tied to one single identity. Bots are a problem but I suspect there are other ways of dealing with them, ways that don't involve making anonymity or pseudonymity impossible.
- k33n 5mo agoI think you’re living in 2010, man. Public discourse in the digital town square is completely destroyed in 2026. I attribute it mostly to bots, whether from corporate, state, or NGO activity. It’s almost impossible to tell what the organic consensus is on anything. Lies spread faster than ever, and it’s confusing the public enough that this is a very real crisis. It’s nice that you suspect that botnets could be handled in some other hypothetical way. But in a technical sense, there’s not really a way to do that without enumerating real identity in some way. There are a dozen ways to handle your “corrupt town” scenario without anonymity that are concrete and not at all hypothetical. It’s plenty easy to silence you when you’re anonymous and speaking out. Just look at what Twitter and Facebook did. And look at what Reddit does every single day. Anonymity will always exist in corners of the internet. But it does not belong in the mainstream, easily accessible parts that most people use.