When Simon Harris said this week that online anonymity was “harming our democracy”, I confess I felt the frisson of agreement with him that he was surely hoping to provoke in normal people up and down the country. By and large, in my experience (200,000-odd tweets in 15 years, to my shame) it is true that the worst, most abusive, most nasty people online are anonymous.
It also seems intuitively true to me that making those people shed their anonymity and post under their real names would immediately dial down some of the more corrosive contributions to public discourse, if for no other reason than that the people who are the worst behaved online are anonymous precisely because they know what they are doing is wrong and would not desire for people to know it was them.
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