The impulse to identity, by law or platform-specific reputation system, is useful for other ends, but the end of judging books by covers should not be one to strive toward.
For instance, is it true that you couldn’t get a COVID test in SF around Jul 4?
With provenance of information, people start trusting trusted sources for facts. With fixed identity, people can evaluate what the preponderant view is.
If you’re in a room with ten of your friends and you could get toilet paper in Jan and all of them couldn’t, you would judge yourself lucky and that there was an availability problem.
If I go online and I see one thousand posts saying the opposite of what I’m seeing, I’m going to ignore them. Primarily because of the identity problem.
Verifiable events can be attested to (like the availability of testing) with trustworthy data, like from a reliable reporter or the test providers or some reliable surveillance mechanisms. Using a identity as a proxy for accountability, in furtherance of reputation management -- as the social media web largely treats all this -- is an error.
People aren't reliable just because we know they're people, as Facebook-provided comments on third-party sites demonstrate.