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by sunpar 1948 days ago
I don’t understand why people believe that anonymity is a right guaranteed to all people making content on the internet.
6 comments

Because if we let people be anonymous, then more people will feel comfortable writing insightful things for us to read. I'd rather have a wider selection of content than know everyone's real name. Knowing who writers are "in real life" is useless and uninteresting most of the time.

In any case, blogging anonymously is certainly technologically possible. And it's neither illegal nor immoral. So I think that makes it a right, no?

> In any case, blogging anonymously is certainly technologically possible. And it's neither illegal nor immoral. So I think that makes it a right, no?

Taking that line of reasoning further, doxxing someone who does not successfully maintain anonymity is also possible. Is it thus also a right?

Anonimity is certainly not a right but sometimes is the only protection for other rights. And we must acknowledge the consequences of technology, unintended or not. For example, nobody expects privacy in public spaces but I think everybody agrees camera surveillance can be abused. Sometimes quantity is a quality of its own.
...okay, "sunpar", we can have that argument once you fix your username.
It's not a legal right if that's what you're getting at. Otherwise, do you also not understand why basically all platforms have pretty assertive (if questionably enforced) anti-doxxing rules?
Pseudonymity is essentially the default state of the internet. The "right" to it just exists by the nature of it.

If you want to remove that right you need to argue why it shouldn't exist

You don't have privacy in your bathroom either. Yet if CNN was to publish nude photos of you you'd be rightly upset.
You absolutely have a right to privacy in your house.
Where’d you get that idea? You not only have a right to privacy in your own bathroom, the courts have declared a reasonable expectation of privacy inside public bathroom stalls, and/or behind privacy partitions. CNN publishing nude photos of anyone going to the bathroom would generally be completely illegal.