> Results show that in the context of online firestorms, non-anonymous individuals are more aggressive compared to anonymous individuals. This effect is reinforced if selective incentives are present and if aggressors are intrinsically motivated.

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

There's been so many words spilled online about how terrible of an idea it is to require confirmed identities for online.

Recently, see https://twitter.com/mmasnick/status/1576274615231401984 or more casually https://www.garbageday.email/p/oh-cool-were-talking-about-an...

> Generally, if your solution is virtually indistinguishable from one of the systems the Chines government is using to keep people in line, your solution is bad.

Mike Masnick in his tweets repeats some talking points but there's no cohesive argument.

Do you mean that in countries where not everyone has government ID? That's not an issue, the government doesn't have to be the authority of ID. Besides, governments can create fake IDs for covert operations anyway. I don't suggest that everyone should connect to the internet with government issued ID card.

I don't mean some idea that could work at some arbitrary point in the future (decentralized whatever...). If a social media platform were to do this, right now, how would they do it without verifying a government issued ID?

Nicknames are an identity and it's pretty much common these days to have nicknamed account on all over the internet. The problem with these is that one can have multiple of those and a behaviour in one place doesn't transfer into other places.

So maybe we can have across-the-internet identities. You are jasonshaev but who you are on twitter? on reddit? on other places? Once you become the person who is known around everywhere the same way, you have the identity that you would like to protect. You can't troll one place when bored then be known as a nice person somewhere else. I think that's good enough identity. The implementation can be around crypto, single sign in, face recognition etc.

If you want to verify some other, "online" identity, that's fine, but I don't see how that would meaningfully affect anyones behavior. To be clear, I don't think verifying someone's real name will meaningfully improve online behavior either -- plenty of other threads explain why. In which case, what's the point of either?

Furthermore, there can be layers of anonymity. There can be anonymous publicly but not to Twitter. That’s dangerous given that Twitter cannot protect your identity from a state actor accessing its internal systems. Thus, again, why would you want a checkmark as a dissident.

So the fact that this applies to some people means that it is an issue for those people.

So maybe, for every single thought one has, one ought not fly around the world and post it on a flyer on every street corner and light post. Which is basically what posting on Twitter is.

But then I think a ton of stuff people casually do online is batshit crazy when you put it in real-world terms. Of course you wouldn't do the above. You wouldn't even do it if you had a magic button that could make it happen for you without taking time & money to go do it in person. "Post my random toilet thought on hundreds of millions of surfaces all over the world? No, god, why would I do that?"

Would you give a teenager access to such a magic button? Of course not. That would be entirely insane. Even if using the button would not, per se, get them in trouble, you'd destroy that thing or put it in a safe. Handing it over to them to do with as they please wouldn't even be something you'd consider doing.

But we live in a world where ~every developed-world kid has a button like that by age 12, and sometimes much earlier. WT actual F. Of course it's causing tons of problems. Most adults couldn't be trusted to make good choices with such a tool (clearly).

You either have people incentivized to self-identify with a checkmark or what? The alternative is to build an AI that identifies you in order to remove bots? I don’t even think that’s possible without it auto removing everyone that uses anonymizing tools like Tor?

See, because we don't say everything that comes to our mind, we are able to interact in a civil manner with people that can have any kind of opinions. In real life, I'm sometimes shocked that someone is a total bigot.

However, when civility is established we can discuss these ideas too and instead of having these people being toxic these ideas can be expressed in a civil manner and discussed. Maybe they have a point sometimes? If they do, it can be dully noted and if they don't they will be exposed to the counter arguments. Also, when ideas are expressed in civil manners, people don't label other people straight as "bigot", "racists" and accept the nuances. In fact, some prominent right-wing people are doing that, people like Jordan Peterson. Because the guy is civil, he is effective and it's up to the rest to contradict his claims in civil manners.

So yes, it is alright to have some self restraint and think before you speak. It's definitely much better than oppressing it.

edit: the comment I responded was a bit different, I guess the OP added more thoughts.