Pseudo anonymity is probably fine, but web-of-trust solutions to help quarantine armies of sock puppets and manipulators would be really useful. Can't imagine why Twitter/FB won't implement. (Ok. I can imagine)
Doesn’t Facebook already have a quasi-WOT? People on Facebook generally see the posts of their friends and those they follow, plus ads. That doesn’t stop fake news from rippling through the social graph.
I can't see any benefit to even pseudo-anonymous political discourse on open mainstream mass-broadcast social media in a free society. If your message has a reach on the order of hundreds of thousands of people, then you should be able to stand by what you say.
If it gets to the point where we have to fear the government retaliating against us, then that government would have probably already shutdown or blocked the popular social networks.
The red scare didn't end with the advent anonymity, but rather it was ended by the checks and balances within the government belatedly stepping up to the plate.
Joe McCarthy was censured by congress and fell out of political favour. Furthermore, the Supreme Court handed down a number of decisions that greatly reduced the scope of the government's ability to penalise supporters of communism such as: Yates v. United States, Scales v. United States, and United States v. Robel. This is how such matters should be tackled in a free society, rather than coming up with elaborate mechanisms to hide our views from the government.
> but rather it was ended by the checks and balances within the government belatedly stepping up to the plate.
Ok, and regardless of that, anonymity still helps people avoid consequences for their speech. Which is a good thing, given that the government has in the past done things like that.
> This is how such matters should be tackled in a free society
Well that is cold comfort to the people who suffered real harm, during the red scare. While other people were trying to solve that problem "the right way", lots of people still suffered harm in the mean time.
Things don't always get solves immediately. Sometimes, problems just exist. And regardless if things have been solved "the right way" or not, other solutions, such as anonymity still help.
None of this stuff is exclusive. Feel free to try and stop government consequences some other way. But regardless of that, anonymity still helps some people avoid some consequences for their speech, which is good.
> elaborate mechanisms
None of this is elaborate. Lots of people have pretty effective ability to post speech anonymously.
Instead, it would be you who would have to engage in large elaborate schemes to prevent people from being anonymous.
The default, easy, non-elaborate solution is what we have now. Which is that there are many platforms where anonymity is easy for most people, most of the time. And that the government would have to take pretty extreme actions to remove that from people, like court orders that don't happen very much right now for most people.
More and more, I realize that I've been fed a warped view of the past. Here in the USA, history book authors and history instructors are almost exclusively on one side of the political spectrum. The people that they glorify and vilify are chosen with extreme partisan bias.
Joe McCarthy wasn't the terrible person he is made out to be. Information discovered later, long after his censure, proves that he was correct in many of the cases where he was thought wrong.
Today's lies and censorship will become the supposed "facts" that are taught to future generations. All sorts of falsehoods will be used to created graded test questions.
How would a “true” web-of-trust be superior?