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The issue of social media accountability and anonymity continues front and centre. I was listening to the BBC’s popular radio show “Any Questions” recently when the panel was asked about the very serious topic of threats and abuse on social media that appears to be forcing some people out of politics and preventing worthy candidates from entering the public sphere. A couple of the panelists said that online anonymity needs to end. You can see their point. But requiring people to disclose their personally-identifiable information to unaccountable social media platforms is not the solution. It is , frankly, none of Twitter’s business who I actually am.

This sounds like a immovable object meeting an irresistible force, but it really isn’t. There is away through this, and it comes from understand how digital identity works (or, at least, should work). What we want is a system where people can have free speech (putting to one side what this really means for a moment) but where they cannot simply post hate speech in the best of cases and death threats etc in the worst of cases.

Here’s a tweet that illustrates the problem...

There are actually three problems here: the first is that nobody knows whether hitler1488boy is actually a real person or a bot operated by agents of a foreign power, the second is that if hitler1488boy is a real person nobody knows who that real person is and the third is that if hitler1488boy breaks the rules then nobody knows whether hitler1488boy2 is that same person as hitler1488boy. I think that, in the presence of a practical digital identity infrastructure, these are easy problems to solve.

How?

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