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> The very fact that publishing an opinion anonymously, at scale, was nearly impossible, prevented the development of many sordid, dark, and "evil" thoughts from reaching the point of public discourse.

I find it somewhat amusing that you say this in response to an article citing the Federalist papers.

The very fact that those papers made it to the publications means they were peer-reviewed and agreed to be redistributed by public institutions. Anonymous internet sites are not peer-reviewed.

Let's not call this "peer-review" as if it were some sort of scientific process.

What you're talking about is a social acceptability test. Now, that's fine, so far as it goes. Every society needs mores and norms to govern behavior (and speech) in order to function. But let's not suppose that suppressing an individual's freedom to express thoughts not pre-approved is going to result in a net win for truth.

>Every society needs mores and norms to govern behavior

What we are experiencing today are those new norms

These new norms are hardly universal.

Publishing at scale anonymously: isn't that exactly what pamphleteers have been known for ever since the time of Martin Luther?

100 pamphleteers probably couldn't reach the same number of people as 1 single person can do today without the slightest peer-review of any sort. And there are certain things that are hard to imagine could ever be spread by pamphlet: child pornography for instance.

The pamphleteers reached nearly every single living human in their time and successfully altered the entire course of human history, in a way that was considered apocalyptic at the time. Free speech in the "say what's on your mind on the internet" sense is EXACTLY what the first amendment was drafted for.

Point taken. However my argument about the the quality of the content of the speech still holds. Sure, pamphleteers could reach the ends of the earth, but the they couldn't publish anything they wanted. Child pornography could not spread by pamphlet.

I don't see why you keep bringing up child pornography. Facebook and Twitter don't allow people to spread it, and no one is suggesting they should. It's entirely a strawman.

As for whether "one person" currently has more reach that the pamphleteers did, I also disagree. A pamphlet is only spread if people are agreeing with its content. Likewise a tweet or facebook post. A billion people post inane content every day. We see a microscopic fraction of it. That is an equivalent form of "peer review" as your pamphlet distributors.

Neither could info on birth control or abortions (or in fact most things we'd consider part of "sex ed" today), but we generally regard those restrictions as having been a bad idea.

This is decidedly ahistorical. Anonymous publishing was rampant in the 18th century. Broadsheets, pamphlets, political screeds, and all manner of printings were published anonymously or under pseudonyms in the time period, not least because there were consequences for putting your name explicitly on subversive materials.

Those ideas were still subject to a much greater level of peer review before they could be redistributed. You couldn't get a broadsheet or pamphlet in front of millions of eyes without the implicit approval of tens of thousands of voluntary distributors.

You keep saying "peer review" but I'm not sure how it applies here. The main way information was distributed in the era of the Federalist Papers was through newspapers, and at the time newspapers were almost entirely enterprises set up by political activists to advance the line of their particular faction. The Federalist Papers were written by several prominent members of the Federalists (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federalist_Party), a movement that would go on to become the first real American political party, and published anonymously in Federalist-leaning newspapers. There was no "peer review" in the sense of any of their opponents reviewing them before publication.

If you want a good sense for what newspapering was like in the early American republic, I highly recommend Richard Rosenfeld's book American Aurora (https://www.amazon.com/American-Aurora-Democratic-Republican...), the story of a newspaper that opposed the Federalists and the price its editor paid for that opposition.

> There was no "peer review"

Further, social media posts like Tweets are _more_ “peer reviewed” than old-timey revolutionary pamphlets: you don’t have much reach on the platform unless people are re-tweeting and following you, so only popular (though not necessarily good) posts get any distribution.

How might we change/regulate internet communication in such a way that someone could anonymously get a message out on the scale of a pamphlet but not on the scale of a tweet or social media post?

Stated another way, my concern is that any changes to free speech might overcorrect and result in it being difficult to anonymously get an unpopular message out to even a modest audience.

>The unique problem of the internet is that it allows bad ideas to infect, fester, and mutate in the minds of others at a speed never seen before, without the natural safeguards that we've always had: peer-review and social acceptance. That leads to a spill-over of bad ideas into the public discourse which, in turn, resets society's definition for what kind of ideas are acceptable. A few rapid cycles of this, and we got our Post Truth World

This is precisely the same logic held by the Church during the Inquisition as they were safeguarding Truth from the Scientific Revolution and the evil of the printing press.

What are some of these "dark" "evil" "bad ideas" you believe are infecting, festering, and mutating in minds thanks to the internet?

One only has to look at which viewpoints get censored to get a pretty good idea which ideas the pro-censorship crowd thinks are the dark, dangerous and evil ones.

Given that the world-view commonly called "progressive" currently dominates, I'd expect the most "dark" views to be those which contradict (or seem to contradict) fundamental tenet of progressivism: the idea that everyone should be equally valued.

If that's the case, those ideas dominated humanity for virtually all of human existence and still dominate in many parts of the world, so it seems strange to suggest the internet is somehow responsible for them circulating today. Is the claim that absent the internet those ideas would have been wiped out by now?