Comment by MSFT_Edging
12 days ago
The chilling effect of tying identity to speech means it directly effects free speech. The Founding Fathers of the US wrote under many pseudonyms. If you think you may be punished for your words, you might not speak out.
We know we cannot trust service providers on the internet to take care of our identifying data. We cannot ensure they won't turn that data over to a corrupt government entity.
Therefore, we can not guarantee free speech on these platforms if we have a looming threat of being punished for the speech. Yes these are private entities, but they have also taken advantage of the boom in tech to effectively replace certain infrastructure. If we need smart phones and apps to interact with public services, we should apply the same constitutional rights to those platforms.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pseudonyms_used_in_the...
> If we need smart phones and apps to interact with public services, we should apply the same constitutional rights to those platforms.
Are private social media platforms "public services"? And also, you mentioned constitutional rights. Which constitution are we talking about here? These are global scale issues, I don't think we should default on the US constitution.
> We know we cannot trust service providers on the internet to take care of our identifying data.
Nobody needs to trust those. I can, right now, use my government issues ID to identify myself online using a platform that's run by the government itself. And if your rebuttal is that we can't trust the government either then yeah, I don't know what to say.
Because at some point, at a certain level, society is built on at least some level of implicit trust. Without it you can't have a functioning society.
> Because at some point, at a certain level, society is built on at least some level of implicit trust. Without it you can't have a functioning society.
This is somewhat central to being remain anonymous.
Protesters and observers are having their passports cancelled or their TSA precheck revoked due to speech. You cannot trust the government to abide by the first amendment.
Private services sell your data to build a panopticon, then sell that data indirectly to the government.
Therefore, tying your anonymous speech to a legal identity puts one at risk of being punished by the government for protected speech.
> You cannot trust the government to abide by the first amendment.
Again, this is a global issue. There is no first amendment here where I live. But the issue of the power these platforms have at a global level is a real one and something has to be done in general to deal with that. The problem is what should we do.