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If we gas ourselves up on hopeium, in theory this could be a positive step in the right direction.
Internet anonymity is already a mixed bag. If you are anonymous but make enough impact there are plenty of avenues for those who want to out you to do so. Just recently Howling Mutant got doxed. He joins a long list of 'doxxed' folks who have had their lives upended in worse ways.
You are not anonymous because people can't find you. You are anonymous because you don't matter. Those who matter get doxxed and the veil of anonymity now harms them, since they are now alone and exposed whilst everyone else is allowed to hide. If there was no anonymity people would take their rights to express themselves more seriously. And then maybe one day the 'freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences' line could die the painful death it deserves.
Outside of that there's plenty of potential utility in ID verification over the internet. Be that to do business with the bank or government offices that would have required you to go there in person, but can now be solved with a few swipes or clicks. I would in fact be quite partial to the idea that certain demographics would never see a gambling ad ever again. Which would otherwise be hard to achieve. On the flipside I'm not really sold on the utility of a low barrier of entry for kids to see porn or fall victim to psychologically manipulative 'gaming' schemes.
To put it another way: If what kids see on the internet matters so much that parents should revoke access to it, why isn't what's on there a bigger deal? We've already seen fine posts on here regarding the subject of foreign interference in media with the recent forced sale of TikTok. That, on top of the promulgation of hard and soft pornography, should be dealt with head on rather than being excused away under the guise that this is all somehow a meaningful avenue of anonymous expression whilst your ability to express your political views is a total sink or swim predicament based entirely on the whims of billionaires and the political extremists they bankroll, who can revoke your ability to meaningfully express yourself at will.
If we are to elevate the internet to be a free market place of ideas then it should be that in totality. Not piecemeal where sometimes our rights are sacred but other times not.
Theoretically your identity could be veiled to the public on certain platforms in a formalized manner, and unneeded breaches of information could be prosecuted similar to a libel suit. The big companies could now properly curate content based on a very firm 'don't show porn to under 18's' criteria. Meaning the government has a foot in the door of their algorithms. Maybe we could finally stop pretending that technology is all too complicated to legislate. And maybe, just maybe, this will lead to my YouTube frontpage sucking less. Maybe.
Now, what are the odds that OS ID verification leads to any of this? None. But the mechanisms would at least theoretically be in place to make the change. As it stands the situation isn't all that great. And I'd wager this would mostly affect phones anyway, which already have pretty ironclad ways of knowing exactly who you are, where you are and so on.
I agree it's way harder to hide than the average person thinks but it's definitely not impossible in the slightest. Even Russia and China, with much tighter grips on the Internet still struggle here. And it requires a lot of time, effort, and to some degree talent to go through the normal doxxing methods, whereas "give your ID and link it directly to your accounts" is incredibly easy comparatively.
That's never going to die because "consequences" is vague and in many ways includes other people speech. Just consider a basic premise. John makes a policy that he will insult anyone who insults him first.
John: Hi Rude stranger: hi you ugly fucker John: Ok bitch, go die in a ditch
The rude stranger has suffered a consequence over his speech. To prevent this consequence requires silencing John.
This is particularly silly but highlights an important point. People criticizing you or insulting feels bad, but that is their speech being used. Someone's speech must be suppressed in order to stop this consequence.
How about a more life impacting example?
John is a CEO of IndustryInc. RandomManager accidently hotmics "And we gotta get these stupid moron customers to accept the price increases somehow". Customers are upset about being insulted and stop buying from Industry Inc. John fires RandomManager to try to bring customers support back and RandomManager can't pay his mortgage.
That sucks for the manager but which thing should we not allow in order to prevent "consequences"? Should customers be forced to buy from companies? Seems silly to me. Should John not be able to fire RandomManager who is hurting his business then?
Freeing the manager of consequences means removing freedom of association from everyone else.
Ok how about John and Joe are friends playing pool at the bar. While drunk, Joe says "John, I really hate your wife and think she's a bitch. She's an ugly fat bitch". John ends the friendship. Joe has now suffered a consequence for his speech, but what is the solution here, state mandated friends?
Yes there are some "consequences" that are obviously BS. Violence, shouting over people, abuse of government. Those things should not be accepted. But a lot of the negative things that happen to someone socially for speech are just the result of others exercising their own basic freedoms. They insult you, they unfriend you, they fire you, they boycott you, whatever because they too are free.
My example pertained more to America. If you sign up for or log in to a website you are functionally trackable, as far as I understood things. So yeah, being hidden is possible, but being hidden and being someone that matters in discourse? I think the barrier to entry on that is a bit too high to be considered relevant.
This feels like a very clear motte and bailey.
No one employing the 'freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences' line is defending peoples rights to disassociate over someone being an asshole in private dealings. Instead they are defending exactly the things described here:
Yes, calling the bosses wife fat to his face might get your fired. Voicing support for party X whilst your boss hates party X might also get you fired, but these are clearly not the same thing. You have to see the distinction between them. At risk of sounding like a complete cardboard box: we live in a democracy! Making political statements in a democracy has to be protected. People can play their cards close to their hands in private, but limiting discourse on the public square via fear of reprisals is not a way for a democracy to function. There has to be a way to navigate that.
You see how you just went "No one is doing that, anyway I'm going to do that" right? I don't see why your boss shouldn't be able to fire you for that. At will employment is the default in the US after all. He can fire you because he doesn't like the color of your shirt, because he doesn't like that your voice sounds annoying, that he saw a picture of your lawn and thought it wasn't taken care of well.
And yet, restricting citizen's freedom of association (which in the US is an implied right under freedom of speech) via fear of reprisals is? If you don't like a company firing John for his speech then you can boycott the company for that, as is your right.
When someone is making a 'this is how I think things should be' argument, it's very annoying to receive a 'well this is how things actually are' response. We're not really playing from the same sheet of music here.
I don't see how I did that unless you are arguing that there is not a difference between hurling personal insults at your boss and publicly voicing a political opinion he disagrees with. I see that distinction clearly, and I also think that expressing political opinions and handling political disagreements is a basic and necessary function of living in a democracy. If you don't see the inherent conflict of serving your democratic duty as an active participant in the political process and being liable to lose your job because of that then I feel we are at an impasse.
Outside of that I feel like we are roaming back to my original point. And I would just directly challenge your conception of 'having rights' in America as you present them here. For example, you can't fire a person because they are black. The Civil Rights Act just doesn't allow that. So you don't really have at will employment by default so we don't even need to act like 'At will Employment' is a point here to begin with.
And that highlights my problem with this predicament. Boycotting a company because they fired an honest and good man for bad reasons is what losers with no rights do. People with actual rights just point the upholder of their rights to the person that violated them and the upholder deals with it.
If you have to uphold your own rights in the immediate sense then you just don't have rights. Like, insofar as rights are real, you have to have an external mechanism that enforces them. Otherwise you are just kind of doing what you want and calling it 'having rights'.
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