Hey, Aqua

[Catseye3]

From the Atlantic article that Mik posted:

"Banks and other industries have “know your customer” rules so that they can’t do business with anonymous clients laundering money from criminal enterprises. Large social-media platforms should be required to do the same. That does not mean users would have to post under their real names; they could still use a pseudonym. It just means that before a platform spreads your words to millions of people, it has an obligation to verify (perhaps through a third party or nonprofit) that you are a real human being, in a particular country, and are old enough to be using the platform. This one change would wipe out most of the hundreds of millions of bots and fake accounts that currently pollute the major platforms. It would also likely reduce the frequency of death threats, rape threats, racist nastiness, and trolling more generally. Research shows that antisocial behavior becomes more common online when people feel that their identity is unknown and untraceable."

What's your opinion? Would this be effective? Has it been tried or thought about, to your knowledge?

[jon-nyc]

It would improve things by ridding us of bots (insofar as it was effective at least).

But it would preserve anonymity which preserves all the nastiness.

(Having said that I’m in favor of anonymity on net)

[Aqua Letifer]

I'm with jon for the most part. We already have some platforms that do not allow for anonymous interaction, and lo and behold, they're far more civil. And there doesn't seem to be a downside to that.

Couple that with the fact that anonymity is really an illusion anyway—Libs of TikTok being a perfect example—and I don't think I can say that I'm absolutely for it.