[buraequete]

I agree, anonymity is really important online, but for social media, maybe it should not be the case? One can go and be anonymous in different platforms already, and if it is a really big concern, they can just evade social media altogether.

Why allow fake account pollution in bigger networks, that are affecting so much of our real life politics today? So much trolling and social engineering are being done through fake accounts, the best solution is a very harsh validation.

[probably_wrong]

Leaving aside the reasons mentioned above about why being anonymous is really important, there's another reason: money.

I think it is wildly accepted that major social networks are full of ghost and/or inactive accounts. If companies cracked down on those, everyone would see that their numbers are not accurate and their valuation would take a big hit. Some CEOs would lose their jobs for sure. So it is not in the big networks' self-interest to change that.

You could make a network from scratch, were identity is baked in from the start. But who would sign up? If Google+ thought us anything it's that people really hate giving their real names (and rightfully so, IMHO). Sure, some services managed it, but they are not as influential as the big ones.

So no new service has the network effects to pull it off, no big network wants to lose money on doing it, and users don't want it.

[coldcode]

There needs to be anonymous accounts on the internet because of safety. However someone you need to be able to derive a system that permits you to validate you are an individual internally to the system, but also allow for anonymity externally. This way the anonymous speaker is protected, but you still know that it is a real person, just not for you to know who. Of course the anonymous person could be a bad actor (whatever you define that to be) but at least its not a bot.

[missosoup]

> One can go and be anonymous in different platforms already, and if it is a really big concern, they can just evade social media altogether.

Anonymity is a hard requirement of free speech. Free speech is a hard requirement of democracy. Some topics can only be safely discussed under anonymity. Some opinions can only be expressed anonymously, especially today in the age of outrage cancel culture where angry mobs seek to shut down and de-platform any views they are opposed to.

Ultimately, de-platforming anonymous speech is a pretty heavy-handed form of censorship.

The tool to combat social media manipulation is education and promotion of critical thinking. Not censorship.