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Comment by create-username | Hacker News Reader

Why ban VPNs when you can freely force social networks like HN to tie nickname registration to an state issued digital ID certificate to guarantee freedom of speech and legal accountability?

https://old.reddit.com/r/XGramatikInsights/comments/1ovd88s/...

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Not just social media, expect ANY app to be able to “verify” you through the new apple digital ID (android wallet soon I assume), the “verification is simple and seamless!!”, and add few Alegria drawings explaining why providing your ID helps defeating the “bad evil guys!!” and you are good to go.

Because you can't freely force social networks like HN to tie nicknames to a state IDs. Just because some politician said that doesn't make it so.

You can, though. That's what laws are.

laws and enforcement are different things.

I get your overall point, but conflation of the two is inaccurate.

I agree, but they're highly correlated, so it's not that this doesn't affect anything.

HN is US based. You'll have fun getting a law like that through in the US, or even the UK or EU. They do have a law like that in China I think.

There's a lot of things that used to be unthinkable in the US. Things that only evil governments in other (usually communist) countries did, but which now happen in the USA. It turns out there's not as much of a difference as you might think, and not much you can do to change that.

I don’t know about the US, but in UK and the EU they are certainly trying to do just that. And if not today, the will simply cook us slowly a little longer until they succeed. The problem is, that regular people just don’t care enough.

Give it a bit more time.

To this day I have no clue what the point of this idea is. Forcing you to use an ID on the internet is the real world equivalent of making everyone you interact with take a photo of your ID. It's completely nonsensical.

Considering that most crimes require people to be physically present at the crime scene, it also doesn't seem to be a functioning deterrent at all in the real world.

Most of the bad behaviour is concentrated in "seedy" places, where you usually have to go out of your way to interact with that place. A real name policy doesn't change the nature of the place at all.

If anything, the places that would be most affected are the ones where people are roleplaying or pretending to be something other than "themselves". E.g. gay or transgender people, furries, MMO/MUD/MUSH players, streamers, etc which overall seem to be exceedingly harmless.

There is also the blatantly obvious problem that this only works on people who are risk averse to begin with. So it will basically have no effect on actual perpetrators, who see some risk vs reward tradeoff for their bad behaviour.

> you can freely force social networks like HN to tie nickname registration to an state issued digital ID certificate to guarantee freedom of speech

Nothing guarantees free speech like making it trivial to keep a copy of everything everyone says that can always be tracked back to their real identity! No way that could have a chilling effect on perfectly normal speech.

And also to defeat AI slopbots!

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