User authentication = user takes responsibility

The argument

The proposal is narrower than it first appears, and its narrowness is the point. Authentication would occur at state level — through an electronic ID mechanism, for instance — establishing once that an account belongs to a particular real person. It would not require that person to be publicly identified. That distinction is what allows the scheme to address trolling without abolishing anonymity. Users would still be allowed to use a nickname on the social network, so their privacy in front of other users is preserved: what they post appears under a pseudonym exactly as it does now, and other participants learn nothing about who they are. What changes is only what happens in the specific case of misconduct, illegal behaviour, or a reported abuse. In those cases the authority can easily trace the identity back, because the link between account and person was established at registration rather than reconstructed afterwards. The effect is to restore a condition that ordinary conduct depends on everywhere else: that a person can be held to account for what they do. Trolling is cheap in large part because it is consequence-free — an account can be discarded and another created, so nothing the user values is exposed by their behaviour. Authentication changes that calculation without changing what anyone is permitted to say. The user takes responsibility for their own contributions in the way they do offline, where a pseudonym may conceal an identity from onlookers but does not conceal it from the law. This is why proponents present it as a proportionate exercise of state authority rather than a form of censorship. Nothing is pre-screened, no speech is blocked, and no user is unmasked to the public. The state's involvement is confined to holding the identifying link and disclosing it once misconduct has already occurred — which is the minimum required for accountability to exist at all.

Premises

Counter-arguments

An identity mechanism has some legal hurdles to his/her implementation. Social network are multi-national entities, for a state it might impossible to impose a restriction o a company which outside its jurisdiction The mechanism might impose an unnecessary over-head. Alternative methods such as ISP tracking allows a law enforcement agency to trace back the originating computer or user. The mechanism might expose the victim of an abuse. Leaks or hacking may cause victin's identity known to the attacker.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The link between anonymity and abuse is weaker than assumed. A great deal of harassment happens under real names on platforms that require them, and studies of comment systems that removed anonymity have found mixed effects on incivility. [Rejecting P2] The premise treats the separation of public pseudonym from state-held identity as secure. What it creates is a register linking speech to legal identity — a target for breach and a lever for any government wishing to identify its critics. The same mechanism that unmasks a troll unmasks a whistleblower, a domestic abuse survivor or a dissident. [Rejecting C] Feasibility is left unaddressed. Platforms are multinational and largely beyond any single state's jurisdiction, existing routes such as service-provider records already allow tracing in criminal cases, and determined bad actors have ready workarounds — leaving the overhead on ordinary users.