First, this place is social media. Bears a thought.
I think that social media is destroying democracy. I also think that this is for a couple reasons: one that people who write anonymously have no accountability and would not stand by what they say if they had to attach their name to it. Secondly, social media was supposed to be about leveling the playing field but organizations and people with means can create multiple identities.
Social media has many benefits and I would not want to see it destroyed or a monopoly given back to the organizations, power and money that controlled traditional media. Where social media is hurting us most is where the traditional powers are able to not only take power in it but appear to be of the people.
For this reasons, I would prefer to see social media fixed.
First, let's admit that anonymous is not really perfect. Governments can still track who is saying what in cases where they want so what I am proposing, will not fix that but it may not make it worse.
Allowing anonymous posts allows people to hide behind this in order to have multiple identities and to say things no person would say to another if they were identified. This is not good. The problem it answered is that people, for professional reasons would be able to participate who otherwise would not. Having seen what has happened to social media, I wonder if the harm done by allowing anonymous posts is not even greater than the harm done by preventing people from posting anonymously (such as in the past where your name would have to appear on letters to the editor). Some people would be horrified to have their names attached to what they say. Others might feel safer not having unamed people be able to attack them. No matter which way you go it is a compromise and I am not sure which is worse.
One way of addressing thsi could be to allow each person to have a single online persona. This could allow more freedom to the people who would have to restrict what they say for professional reasons. It would reduce the accountability and probably allow some of the venom but it may be less than we have now. There would need to be a mechanism to register these with IPs perhaps to make sure that a person cannot have more than one. I see problems with that but it is not impossible. I think it could reduce the problem.
Another possibility would be to have a serial number unique to a person appear with their online name: this would allow people to see where there is a situation where many different identities are being used by the same person. It would not reduce the problem of anonymous posts from an accountability point of view but help mitigate the problem of many online identities being created by the same person or non-existent persons.
I do not have the answer as to how to make this work but I feel that the two reasons why social media is a problem are:
1) lack of accountability in anonymous posts
2) one person or entity being able to seem like many individuals
Ironically, both problems with social media existed in the traditional media prior to the advent of social media (not in letters to the editor, however) and social media was intended to make things more democratic by leveling this advantage. Social media is making this worse because it allows people to think it is leveling the playing field when it is masking the same powers to do the same thing in social media that they did before -- except they are able to be more anonymous. If social media could be reformed to deliver on the promise it originally had we woudl not ahve the same problem.
Now of course I am sympathetic to the simple way Quizzical put it that people are the problem, she is right in many ways -- the problem with that is that this does not come with a mitigation strategy.
I wish I had better solutions but this is for discussion and I think we have to consider what social media was meant to do and why it is becoming a problem -- and then how to deliver on what it was supposed to do with less of the problem.
