What anonymity does do to social media is muddy the waters to a great degree. Online discourse is now built on bad faith, because of the lack of consequence and reputation.
I've enjoyed anonymity as much as the next person, but I believe it is a net detriment to communication.
It's not just about The Pentagon Papers and Wikileaks. It's about people being able to point out banal incompetence and small scale corruption so it can be corrected without being retaliated against by petty members of the city government with egg on their face, even when there are no journalists willing to take the small story.
It's not even just about whistleblowing. When you have to write everything knowing your mother, your boss and every busybody in the PTA will probably read it, people are going to self-censor.
And then there's this: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/apr/07/twitter-t...
> Anonymous leaks are still best presented by a journalist that's willing to vet the info and put their name on it.
Journalist is not a title of nobility, it's anyone engaged in that specific activity.
To do what you're asking, a source would need to anonymously send the information to different prospective journalists until one has the resources and willingness to vet and publish it, in parallel if it's at all time sensitive. In other words, the source needs the ability to send information anonymously to an arbitrarily large number of people with no formal credentials. Who then themselves need the ability to anonymously pass it on to arbitrarily many others who they think might have more resources or be more willing to formally attach themselves to something with risk of retaliation by powerful forces.
Which is basically a description of anonymous social media.
> What anonymity does do to social media is muddy the waters to a great degree. Online discourse is now built on bad faith, because of the lack of consequence and reputation.
We already have the ability to verify identities. We know that @ggreenwald on Twitter is Glenn Greenwald of The Intercept because it says so on the official web page of The Intercept.
Nothing stops anyone from only reading things written by people with verified identities. If you don't like anonymous or pseudonymous speech then why are you listening to it? Instead what you're proposing is to prohibit everyone else from hearing it. Which is never something anyone should get to decide for everyone else.
Real name policies eliminate specific categories of speech.
One of those categories is trolling, which naturally makes everybody very happy. The problem is that some of the other categories are really important.
If you require real names then people with minority views are afraid to present them, even when they can make a major contribution. People won't disclose relevant inside information, including malfeasance, because they face being fired or abused until they quit. People won't say anything against the interests of anyone in a position of power over them.
It's basically a mechanism that gets rid of the Nazis and SJWs by getting rid of anyone critical of the government or existing power structures. The resulting debate is unquestionably a lot more polite, but politeness is not the only consideration.