Mass shooter manifestoes have cited both 4chan posts and named newspaper, TV and radio personalities. People are quite capable of being terrible under their own names.

Counterpoint to your anonymity argument: we’ve learned in that past few years that people are very much OK with being publicly identified with hateful ideologies/ideas, e.g. MAGA supporters. A lot of them publicly post and participate online under their real identities, a lot of of it on Facebook.

Anonymity is only a deterrent when you are the odd one out. When the President of the US is the one spouting the insanity you don't have to hide anymore.

> Anonymity is only a deterrent when you are the odd one out. When the President of the US is the one spouting the insanity you don't have to hide anymore.

The problem with anonymous online echo-chambers is that it lulls those in the community that there are more of them in the real world than there really are, which emboldens people to take their online craziness into the real world. This goes for everything from politics to "The raid on Area 51"

People also act differently when they're free from any risks of the behavior - and this holds true with money, social interactions, whatever.

That sounds like a cyber safety issue more so than a problem with anonymity. Remember all those lessons about not sharing your real address or name online? Add another caveat that the two idiots fighting may, in fact, be the same person putting on a show. In fact, the crowd cheering them on is also half-composed of the same guy (the other half is organic popcorn-watching).

Exactly. Personally I’d rather see more of internet communities/products regulating access to anonymity. This opinion is intensely unpopular around here, but IMO it addresses the root cause. The internet made it instantly easy and cheap to have multiple identities. Don’t get me wrong, we still need that tool in a modern human’s toolset, but it shouldn’t be cheap and easy to generate low value spam. Imagine if Twitter had a community reputation system and Twitter itself never removed any Tweets but just let the community downvote them into nonexistence, like we do here…

Community reputation (mostly) works the same as a lack of anonymity, it means your actions are tied to your account (in re twitter) and some extent to your pseudonym.

I'm a furry, furry is a community built around an isolation between our IRL identity and our online one. But the community is tight knit enough that your reputation will follow you around - the identity you created for yourself yes - but still your identity, and if you're too far out of bounds, you get quietly (or loudly) excluded from the mainstream of the community. It largely functions the same way as tying your real name to every online identity.

Now take something like twitter - you start with a karma of say 75, anything less than 100 karma, and your tweets wont show up in searches, anything less than 50 and you start to disappear from timeline - even for followers, anything less than 30, you disappear from lists - effectively this creates an automatic shadow banning system.

But a saving grace, you earn a quarter point of karma just by not having any negative interactions on the site, you could also earn positive karma by upvotes on content.

You could also put some other bounds in there too, like limiting how much positive karma or negative karma a single post could earn, to prevent it from skewing the numbers too much (it should be based on a weighted average of interactions, not just on one tweet that goes viral and the rest of it is low effort shitposting).

Ideally you'd have a cross site 'identity' service that would also carry along a weighted karma score from all of the places you interact, and allow people to see those links - you're still abstracted from your real identity, and you're always welcome to start over again, abandon your account and start from zero, but there is persistent history of your interactions.

I mean, we haven't had a society that was free of violence either, but that doesn't invalidate the cause of nonviolence.

> Absolute free speech and anonymity is a toxic combination.

Yes, because in the real world - if you say something hateful enough to the wrong person - you'll get your head knocked off.

So people have some sort of filter.

When you take that away - the trolls with no lives come out just to agrivate people because misery demands company.

"Social media made y'all way too comfortable with disrespecting people and not getting punched in the face for it." - contemporary philosopher

Free speech was not "envisaged in the constitution." Free speech is an unalienable right of men, which our Creator endowed us with.