Even if it were so, it is still a win. Without anonymity there is no liberty to the weak at all. And thus for that liberty we must endure all the crap.
The people who need anonymity are the people who would be punished for saying things people in power don't like.
I don’t think that’s true, unfortunately. You have lots of cases of major propaganda accounts found to be foreign actors and pretty much nothing happened to them
And even that is assuming they need the same person to be writing the posts as lending their name. They could also pay a homeless person or food service worker in Kentucky to sign up for the account and still have a troll farm in another country writing the posts.
There is not only a massive supply of such people, they have high turnover as the seniors graduate but the new freshmen are broke again and the unemployment rate is fairly stable but the specific people distressed enough to sign their name for a buck are constantly in flux, so it doesn't even matter if they get banned.
For public feeds, you seem to assume that only the propagandists can leverage bots effectively, which is the right assumption for the centrally-controlled social media platforms of today. But if we make a platform that is just some protocols that can't be controlled by anyone, you and I would be able to spin up anti-propaganda bots to pwn the propaganda bots without fear of repercussion. Anyone can try to push public opinion in a specific direction, but someone else will simply go the opposite way. There would be no moderator or algorithm to artificially boost one type of noise over another, so we would actually get a less corrupted feed that accurately represents what people are thinking because the noise cancels eachother out. And if you want to customize the feed, we could make client-side filters and algorithms. There could be an open-source algorithm called "Hacker News" that you can just download and install into your open-source social media client.
As for keeping the powerful in check, don't forget that we've kind of lost equality before the law at this point, as shown by the Epstein saga. If we try to remove anonymity from the Internet right now, it will only be used to surveil regular citizens but not the people we need to keep in check. I would happily support a law that selectively enforces the other way around, though: let's mandate real identity for all government personnel online and expose their Polymarket accounts.
This has never been true and never will be. Entities with more resources have dramatically more ability to put their perspective out and dominate the messaging.
It's like the believe that markets are inherently efficient and we just need to get rid of all the government interference that distorts the free market.
There is no evidence for it, the theoretical argument is so flimsy it falls apart under the slightest scrutiny, the various ways in which markets are inefficient are several entire subfield of economics. Yet the idea persists...
The notion that you just need a proper free market of ideas and then the best ideas will automatically win, and we just need to get rid of everything that interferes with this free market of ideas is cut from the same cloth...
Maybe it has the same attraction as "blame the immigrants". It gives you an immediate automatic scapegoat for everything you see in society that you don't like.
That being said, I do agree that there's a dangerous apathy about how the free markets work. The free market, being the product of voluntary action, is anything but automatic.
But I don't see how that is a scapegoating mechanism for "anything you don't like". Anymore than apathy is, at least. I see human rights (specially the right to live and private ownership) being used as scapegoats much more often.
When everyone can talk without censorship and fear of persecution, the best ideas might not always win, but the good ones usually will, and the worst ones will always lose. This is why every authoritarian regime needs censorship to survive.
The good ideas do not usually win. The loudest ones tend to win. The worst ones frequently win.
The loudest ones are not aligned with eachother. Their efforts to influence public opinion will neutralize eachother, and none of them can gain moderating power over the platform because the platform is just protocols. Ideas will clash, leaving only what people think is good in common. And that is the definition of the common good.
Do you have any better ideas? Or do you think that you possess the superior definition of "good" such that public discourse to search for it is unnecessary?
> The loudest ones are not aligned with eachother. Their efforts to influence public opinion will neutralize eachother, and none of them can gain moderating power over the platform because the platform is just protocols
This does not match reality. Those with money and power DO have a lot of goals that are aligned with each other. They're not incompetent, and they understand the power of collusion. If you think they cancel each other out you're living in a fantasy.
The solution, presuming said law to be fair, is to make a world where no one has to sleep under bridges, to beg on the streets and steal their bread. Not getting rid of the rule of law. Of course, that presumes said law to be fair (aside from the last part, it isn't).
> Those with money and power DO have a lot of goals that are aligned with each other. They're not incompetent, and they understand the power of collusion.
Most people share goals, understand the benefits of collaboration, and exploitable conflicts still arise. The problem isn't caused by a lack of shared goals, but the presence of conflicting ones. Even just one can inhibit collaboration and induce sabotage. After all, there is no long-term collaboration to be had if your goals are mutually exclusive.
Also, it think it bears reminding that the alternative, regulation, is enforced through a powerful corporation that is structurally much harder to hold accountable (despite best efforts, although it was always a non-starter), the state.
How has this worked out with email, text messages, or the phone system, or even postal mail.
I rarely receive messages from kindly anti-propaganda bots, but sure receive a lot of messages from actual propaganda that bypass filters and infect everything like cockroaches.
Assuming that otherwise won’t happen is a basic failure to understand humanity. Spend a few hours with middle school boys and after observing their behavior, try to determine if your protocols will withstand that goofiness, naivety, rudeness, absurdness, sensitivity, callousness, puerileness, unpredictability, and rambunctiousness.
As a parent to several, I see how educational institutions (school) whose job it is to be experts at this exact behavior are failing catastrophically by not understanding this very basic idea. If your protocol something that is designed for well meaning people with good behavior who trust one another, it probably won’t work to well when given to middle schoolers and will work even worse when someone with the slightest bit of malice gets a hold of it.
Those are centrally controlled systems where propangandists have home field advantage (email is debatable, it's halfway, it wasn't designed with the existence of companies like Google in mind). But even if that wasn't the case, it's not the same phenomenon as bots on social media. The important difference is that on social media, if there is no central moderation, the bots will cancel out eachother's influence. If I make an anti-propaganda email bot, it doesn't lower the ranking of the propaganda that's already in your inbox. But if I have an upvoting bot for their downvoting bot, they neutralize eachother.
Also, ensuring that nobody except the participants of group chats and DMs can figure out eachother's real identity is already a massive win. That alone makes it a lot harder to beat a population into submission.
There are a lot of unexamined assumptions in what you write...