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Comment by linspace | Hacker News Reader

Thank you for the link to the NYT article. I completely agree with your reading.

Politicians have known forever that sometimes is more important to control what the conversation is about that what you actually say and traditional media is the way you control the conversation. But they have lost their monopoly. I'm not comfortable with the monopoly being transferred to big tech companies by the way which are usually the main target of their hatred but in this case I think it signals a new low in ethics that they are attacking an independent blogger.

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Here's that time where the legacy media threatened to doxx someone if they made memes they didn't like again:

>CNN is not publishing "HanA*holeSolo's" name because he is a private citizen who has issued an extensive statement of apology, showed his remorse by saying he has taken down all his offending posts, and because he said he is not going to repeat this ugly behavior on social media again. In addition, he said his statement could serve as an example to others not to do the same.

>CNN reserves the right to publish his identity should any of that change.

https://edition.cnn.com/2017/07/04/politics/kfile-reddit-use...

If some lawyer is reading this I would love to know what it takes for an extortion to become a criminal offense.

I don’t understand why people believe that anonymity is a right guaranteed to all people making content on the internet.

You don't have privacy in your bathroom either. Yet if CNN was to publish nude photos of you you'd be rightly upset.

You absolutely have a right to privacy in your house.

Where’d you get that idea? You not only have a right to privacy in your own bathroom, the courts have declared a reasonable expectation of privacy inside public bathroom stalls, and/or behind privacy partitions. CNN publishing nude photos of anyone going to the bathroom would generally be completely illegal.

Anonimity is certainly not a right but sometimes is the only protection for other rights. And we must acknowledge the consequences of technology, unintended or not. For example, nobody expects privacy in public spaces but I think everybody agrees camera surveillance can be abused. Sometimes quantity is a quality of its own.

Because if we let people be anonymous, then more people will feel comfortable writing insightful things for us to read. I'd rather have a wider selection of content than know everyone's real name. Knowing who writers are "in real life" is useless and uninteresting most of the time.

In any case, blogging anonymously is certainly technologically possible. And it's neither illegal nor immoral. So I think that makes it a right, no?

> In any case, blogging anonymously is certainly technologically possible. And it's neither illegal nor immoral. So I think that makes it a right, no?

Taking that line of reasoning further, doxxing someone who does not successfully maintain anonymity is also possible. Is it thus also a right?

Pseudonymity is essentially the default state of the internet. The "right" to it just exists by the nature of it.

If you want to remove that right you need to argue why it shouldn't exist

It's not a legal right if that's what you're getting at. Otherwise, do you also not understand why basically all platforms have pretty assertive (if questionably enforced) anti-doxxing rules?

...okay, "sunpar", we can have that argument once you fix your username.

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