Anonymous Twitter is free Twitter
Here’s my idea. Twitter should ban all anonymous accounts, but allow all speech. Say what you want, but say it with your name attached.
— @MattWalshBlog, Twitter, 2016-02-16
Every complex problem has a simple solution, which won’t work.
Matt Walsh already uses his real name on Twitter, and so what he’s proposing is a system for which he suffers none of the drawbacks.
To impose this system on all of Twitter would be highly problematic.
Facebook’s real name policy hasn’t been effective at stopping misuse; in fact, it’s made it worse. It continues to ban users who go by their authentic name where it differs from their legal name, despite claiming to accept authentic names. And while users with unusual names are barred, a fake common name easily passes.
The Google+ real name policy didn’t solve the quality of Youtube comments; despite expectations, many users continued to leave harsh negative using their real names. The supposed reputation penalty had little effect.
Reliably enforcing the real name policy would be impractical. Even Facebook doesn’t force every user to provide photo ID, so a user intent on harassment need only sign up as a “John Smith”.
A real names policy would be massively unpopular with Twitter users and cause problems for an enormous proportion of accounts. So while Matt Walsh can continue to tweet freely, his Twitter followers would rapidly dwindle.
Twitter culture has grown around an ecosystem where one account does not necessarily represent one individual’s legal identity or real name. Parody accounts, “weird twitter” and pseudonymous writers are gone. Twitter loses @dril, @RikerGoogling, @thegrugq, and @SwiftOnSecurity, to name a few. So not only does Walsh lose followers, he also loses finds his timeline emptying too.
If non-personal accounts can exist, like Facebook allows arbitrarily named Pages, then such accounts will effectively allow aliases anyway and circumvent the public reputation economy that the real name policy relies on.
The biggest flaw, perhaps, is that for all of these costs, allowing all speech isn’t even legally possible. The proposal’s benefits never happen, so you ruin Twitter for a lot of people for no benefit.
The ultimate effect of a free-for-all real name system is to increase, not decrease censorship, simply by silencing anyone who doesn’t benefit from the privilege of holding unassailable social status and popular opinions. However, the people who benefit from privilege are quite often unaware that they possess something others don’t.