Online Anonymity and Free Speech

[Phoebe]

This is very interesting article suggesting that one of the best ways to protect free speech and mitigate against the negative effects of online harassment and authoritarian suppression of speech is to turn the "idea exchange" portions of internet media into, essentially, anonymous fora. I am not on board this bus for the whole ride because the author also talks about wanting to provide for verification of some aspects of a person's "true" identity so that those who engage with her will have confidence that, for instance, if she says she's a woman, someone has verified this. I am not even clear HOW we verify that people are women in real life - is that a birth certificate? Doctor's note? Anyway, you get the point - for instance, if you had a graduate degree in geology people could know that about you even if they didn't know who you were. But I like it that people don't know those things; I find that I get better unfettered access to the bullshit inside another person's mind and character when they respond to experts as if they were not actually experts, or non-experts as if they were experts. Ah, I amuse myself, but really - I think there is merit to this proposal. There were good reasons why early forays into social life on the internet were like going on a CB with trucker handles. Maybe someday you'd find that trucker in real life when you passed him on the road; maybe someday you'd meet up with those people from the internet, or they'd find a way to locate the phone number associated with your connection, or ... but the quality of discourse seems to me greatly improved when we cast off all the other "identity" nonsense and just let 'er rip, creating communities that self-police violators and evolve according.

The problem is, can we really get anonymity of a form strong enough to support this? I always feel like if there's a will to dox someone, there is a way. Is doxx dox or doxx?