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Re:Testimony of Mark Zuckerberg – Hearing Before US House of... by smsm42 on Monday April 09, 2018 @04:20PM (#16796623)
Also, extremely scary. This means that if you want to do any political action, you need to entrust your most detailed personal identification to Facebook. And if Facebook is latter served with a subpoena to disclose these data, they will be only too happy to oblige. It may not be too much a concern in a country where there is a functioning democracy and strong judiciary protections, but in countries where you could disappear for criticizing the government it makes Facebook completely unfit for use by anyone but government propaganda outlets. It will also have chilling effects for speech even in the US - there are numerous examples of people being subject to bullying and personal destruction campaigns for either publishing or even sponsoring messages that some influential groups did not like. Of course, Facebook has no legal responsibility to support this - or any kind of - speech, but elimination of this kind of speech from any public place hurts the democratic process much more than minuscule influence of some bad actors.

Anonymous or pseudonymous political speech is very valuable for a robust democratic debate, and it is extremely sad - though not exactly surprising - that it is being eradicated under the guise of "transparency" and "protecting the elections from foreign influence" and all kinds of bullshit like that.

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