I'm always puzzled by such a claim. One can look at Facebook to see the comments people put up tied to their real name and find no shortage of utterly abhorrent comments. Not sure why there's such a pervasive memory-holing of this when people talk of wanting to tie the ability to comment publicly to peoples' identities.
Comments in Facebook may not be perfect, but they are vastly better than youtube comments. This is a false equivalence.
I've personally seen WAY more abusive and hateful comments on Facebook, from real accounts of real people, with pictures and friends and everything, than I have ever seen on YouTube. This may be very locale dependent, but in my country (Romania, which has a pretty large proportion of people online from very socially conservative backgrounds) you can easily find extremely explicitly misoginistic, racist, homophobic, and just plain hateful comments coming from real FB and Instagram accounts, again, from people using their real names and faces and everything. I've seen far fewer similar comments on YouTube videos, even ones from the same country.
Our experiences differ in that regard. And no it isn't a false equivalence since Facebook's "use your real ID" commenting system is directly comparable to any proposed system to mandate use of someone's ID to post on other platforms.
> I'm always puzzled by such a claim. One can look at Facebook to see the comments people put up tied to their real name and find no shortage of utterly abhorrent comments. Not sure why there's such a pervasive memory-holing of this when people talk of wanting to tie the ability to comment publicly to peoples' identities.
This should give insanely obvious evidence that clear-name policy does not lead to a more civilised discussion. I mean, everybody who went to a public school [in the American sense of the word] already knows this well: "everybody" knew the names of the schoolyard bullies.
The political wishes of clear-name policies are rather for surveillance and to silence critics of the political system.
It does change people's behavior. Perhaps the average person will use more polite language? But it's not uncommon for me to see dehumanization, threats, and calls for literal mass-murder-of-entire-demographics genocide promoted with polite language. Sometimes used by journalists. Sometimes by academics. Sometimes by podcast hosts. Sometimes by their fans. Sometimes by politicians. All using their real names.
I frequently encounter people using their real name saying my family deserves to die. Who would, in a heartbeat, threaten my employer by dint of a relative's place of birth.
Not having my real identity behind my posts is my only means of keeping myself safe from extremely sick people online who have a culture of intimidating into silence those that express views or belong to a demographic they detest.