Why the past 10 years of American life have been uniquely stupid
&gt; Banks and other industries have “know your customer” rules so that they can’t do business with anonymous clients laundering money from criminal enterprises. Large social-media platforms should be required to do the same. That does not mean users would have to post under their real names; they could still use a pseudonym. It just means that before a platform spreads your words to millions of people, it has an obligation to verify (perhaps through a third party or nonprofit) that you are a real human being, in a particular country, and are old enough to be using the platform. This one change would wipe out most of the hundreds of millions of bots and fake accounts that currently pollute the major platforms. It would also likely reduce the frequency of death threats, rape threats, racist nastiness, and trolling more generally. Research shows that antisocial behavior becomes more common online when people feel that their identity is unknown and untraceable.<p>Yet anonymity&#x2F;pseudonymity is incredibly valuable- it is easier to change your mind and be open to new ideas, you can be more honest and direct, and less fearful of bad actors. The author of this post clearly thinks the entire net to be composed of nothing but Facebook&#x2F;Twitter&#x2F;Instagram and the like, but the definition of &quot;social media&quot; can be extended to any 1 or more machines which can send and receive IP datagrams between each other. The internet was doing just fine when people owned more of their communications, running servers or at least using infrastructure run by fellow human beings, rather than consuming content from a handful of global feeds susceptible to these social Sybil attacks.<p>Just outlaw or intensely regulate these massive, centralized&#x2F;proprietary social media algorithms so that we can return to what was before, all while retaining the gift of anonymity.