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by reillyse 53 days ago
How do we know that? Honest question. Anonymity is just not a feature of normal political or civil life in most countries. In fact it can often be contrary to civility. I don't see why removing Anonymity and preventing foreign meddling in ones country is a bad thing.
1 comments
burnt-resistor 50 days ago
Who's "we?" There is no shared or special knowledge, but any superficial application of critical thinking reaches obvious conclusions quickly. I can only inform from my perspective but cannot think for you.

There are costs to open societies... like people being jerks.

Closed societies deny anonymity and are able to punish dissent and opposition easily because they know what everyone is doing at almost all times. Speech ceases to be free which repression becomes rampant.

Pick 1. There is no perfect but don't let perfection be the enemy of the good.

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reillyse 49 days ago
This is a pretty incoherent comment. You realize you mentioned “we” first so calling me out for using inclusive language doesn’t really make any sense. As for the rest of it, it’s all super basic half baked ideas that even to discuss we would have to spend 10x the amount of characters defining what nonsense you are talking about.
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reillyse 49 days ago
In retrospect I should not have made this comment, I was frustrated and replied rudely.

I think that there are many points to address in your comment, not least the definition of "open" and "closed" societies. But anonymous and non-anonymous do not correspond with open and closed. We aren't talking about "people being jerks" we are talking about nation-state adversaries controlling democracies by sock puppeting and astroturfing and other nefarious means of control. These were not attack vectors before we had social media (or at least were much less potent - a letter to the editor from a. non.) but they have become serious ways to influence populations and control narratives. This is bad. This is an existential issue for modern western democracies exactly because they are open liberal societies. If we lived in autocracies it wouldn't matter because we wouldn't have any influence.

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