I have been on the side of the free and anonymous internet for a long time.<p>But honestly, I am not sure about how I feel anymore. Internet has become a jungle where scams, lies, all sort of crimes, propaganda and manipulations from hostile foreign countries are now common and expected things of our daily life.<p>This is clearly destabilizing our democraties by creating distrust toward our institutions, and thus threatening peace and freedoms. And I absolutely blame social networks.<p>From a technical perspective I understand very well that there is no realistic solution to those problems, short of forbidding anonymity and requiring people to use their official identity.<p>There is of course the risk of this being abused by our own governements to attack freedoms, but lately I feel like this option would by far have more benefits than drawbacks.
Social media should be banned for adults.<p>But seriously, this is just a way to tie your real life identity digitally to your online account, and restricts people from offing any services at all without government blessing. It's evil, insane, Orwellian and wrong.<p>Parents should be responsible for living by example and deleting all their social media. Your kids don't need it and you don't need it. Your life will be better without it.<p>Australia is an authoritarian hellscape now so I'm sure this will pass.
Related: <i>Australia proposes ban on social media for those under 16</i> (525 points, 14 days ago, 551 comments) <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42071310">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42071310</a>