Yes, it is very much a trade off situation. Wants vs needs vs family life. Many families are helpless, I wish there was more support too. The middle class is squeezed while tax breaks are given to the higher income earners. Things are getting better ( paternity leave, expanding maternity leave, sick leave etc) and this Covid crisis has laid bare the disparities in the workforce.
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So to be clear, I’m in favor of it being as hard to be anonymous on the internet as it is off the internet. Secret balloting isn’t affected. The right to privacy, which is inviolable, isn’t affected either. There are pros and cons to the argument, but if anonymity weren’t possible or came at significantly greater cost and difficulty, then almost everything horrible that’s emerged from the swamps of the internet would not have achieved their current prevalence and strength; including Qanon, cyber-bullying, and the flourishing of every flavor of corrosive extremism. If only 4chan, the notorious nexus of anonymous anything-goes-ness started by a 14-year-old boy in 2003 to talk about naked anime, was somehow excised from history, then Trump may have never been elected.
No need for the wary to be worried, however… I suspect online anonymity will be with us for a long time. In the US, because of fairly recent SCOTUS precedents, anonymous speech is closely associated with – but not textually included in – the constitutional right to free speech. Anonymity is conceived of as being on par with other manifestations of the First Ammendment like freedom of the press, freedom of assembly and freedom of religion – all of which are in the text and universally held to be sacrosanct. Obviously, our supposed anonymity is functionally illusory these days… but it’s an illusion we cling to nonetheless because it makes us feel safe. Meanwhile, bad actors exploit the illusion to sicken and weaken the system.
Nobody thinks Trump is an actual card-carrying member of the National Socialist Party. He’s not even a small-‘n’ nazi, he’s just a virtueless con-man with an intuitive knack for dominating a social space and instinctive authoritarian tendencies. He’s certainly a populist, although that doesn’t reveal much. If there’s any logic to the phenomenon of Trumpism, it’s the logic of white supremacy, but for Trump even that is a matter of expedience not conviction.
Populism is a political style, not a party, ideology or ethos. Sanders being stuck with the “populist” label always confounded me, because he’s held the same political convictions his entire career, so much that it frequently restricted his personal prospects. What’s “populist” about being a poorly dressed, mumbly socialist in the 90s heyday of bipartisan neoliberalism? Trump, on the other hand, has always adopted whatever political position (or shameless lie) that immediately benefited him personally, whether by writing checks or addressing audiences.
IMO too 
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Just a reminder that the topic of this thread is FaceBook, not American politics in general.
Have a lovely day eveyone. 
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ON FACEBOOK:
These subjunctive “shoulds” aren’t mutually exclusive. Pushback is not just inevitable, it’s healthy and necessary. Historical correction tends to be overcorrection, and we are seeing a classical dialectic discourse playing out. One the one hand, there is the sociopolitical phenomenon variously known as critical race theory, identity politics, the successor ideology, cancel culture, wokeness and the SJWs. And on the other hand, there are conservative reactionaries who rail against all of that with all the condescension and covert, closetted bigotry they can muster. But there is much grey area too, the synthesis.
ALSO ON FACEBOOK:
Personally, I can’t see this in young-vs-old terms as I see it being discussed in this thread. I can easily imagine radicals and reactionaries of all ages. The ideological camps are not necessarily grouped by age. There are influential people with no claim to the excuses of immaturity or inexperience who are prescribing far-reaching illiberal, irrational or callow utopian solutions to systemic social problems. E.g. this, this and this.
RE: FACEBOOK:
In many cases, the pushback is not reactionary conservatism, but rather the loyal opposition expressing its opinion in a good faith effort to right the the ship. Such as this.
Also, FACEBOOK IS BAD AND YOU SHOULD DELETE YOUR ACCOUNT
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Sure. I didn’t think you were extending your argument to the secret ballot. I just think that some of the reasons for the origination of that apply to political discourse online. I suppose it’s possible many of the major social media companies might be persuaded to sign up to an anti-anonymity policy. Facebook these days is actually quite good on this. I very rarely use Facebook. I actually have a “John Smith” type dummy account that I set up many years ago that I might log into twice a year if there’s some Facebook link I need to check out. Seemingly, it would be no longer possible to create such an account. There’s a real name policy these days where official ID has to be supplied.
Anyway, I think generally the genie is out of the bottle on anonymity in social media. These fringe groups such as QAnon just migrate to other places on the web. Though I guess they may get less traction in more out of the way places. It would probably take something like the “great firewall of China” and their compulsory registration of internet users to meaningfully eliminate anonymity, probably not somewhere where we will end up!
Honestly, I don’t think kids below a certain age should be left anywhere near social media or smartphones. Whatever about adults, that’s something people can control to some extent.
Sure, I’ve seen some fairly hyperbolic writing that all but names him one, but I generally agree with the above. I’d better not veer too much away from the substance of the thread as we’ve been warned, so one last point on populism!
The term “populism” is almost invariably used in a pejorative sense whether by sitting politicians or political scientists. It is also a rather vague and slippery term. I’d actually consider FDR to be a populist (though in the best possible sense). He actually delivered and was prepared to set aside elite interests, e.g. when the US Supreme Court was blocking to pass New Deal legislation he actually threatened to expand the court with 5 additional justices. Bernie Sanders with his talk of modern versions of the “New Deal” was following in his footsteps. Anyway, I’d better shut up now about off-topic stuff! 
Sure, but if you enact stricter statutory laws about what happens on the web rather than leaving it up to private companies, such as Facebook, 4chan, etc., to police themselves, then the only place to migrate is off the web, or to the dark web. The latter will always exist, but just as it is now, it will be difficult to access and associated with vice, antisocial behavior and unreliable information, like a combination of Las Vegas and supermarket tabloids. It will be cordoned off from a healthy, functional civil society.
You refer to “fringe groups,” but that speaks to heart of the problem. Many people, myself included, have despised and avoided social media almost since its inception, but it’s now becoming an existential threat to civilization precisely because the lunatic “fringe” is being accepted in the center due to correctable structural deficiencies. Bhante @sujato decries the lack of moral leadership, and most people here seem to be with him on that, but I think collectively we are still coming to terms with the scope of the moral crisis.
The big conceptual hurdle is that we have nothing in history with which to compare Facebook and Twitter. They claim they are merely “technology companies” but effectively they are a global commons for public speech, the largest publishers and advertisers the world has ever imagined, and aggregators of personal data on a scale and to a level of detail that historically only governments were empowered to collect.
The fantasy of internet pioneers was that if you created a lawless virtual space, then it would bring out the best in humanity. So much for that… more laws are needed.
Yeah, probably… but ultimately the system of government isn’t at issue – the argument is that governance must happen.
PS, The New Deal wasn’t “populist.” Initially, it wasn’t even popular; it was actually rather geeky and academic – basically applied Keynesian economics. Same goes for the Green New Deal. Court-packing, I might add, isn’t a feature of populism or any other -ism, it’s just a legal power play available to the executive branch in the US federal system.
IMO it’s a very tricky issue. Companies like Facebook are probably at this point in some kind of grey area between being a neutral “public commons”/public utility and publisher that screens content. Publishers are usually regulated, e.g. media ownership laws trying to limit concentration of ownership. It’s often a hobby of billionaires to acquire portfolios of various TV, radio, newspaper and other media companies for the political leverage it will give them. Then there are older laws for utilities like telephone companies so they are not liable for the content of the media they are carrying. This was the type of law that applied to many internet content providers; they were not expected to be liable for the content they held as long as they met basic requirements for taking down problematic (defamatory, illegal or whatever) material once notified of it.
The definition of what is fake or fringe is always going to be subjective to some degree. Requiring such big internet companies to control content is going to necessarily push them in a more political direction. It also increases the argument that many such companies are simply too big and should be broken up. Or should one set up a National Council for the Determination of What is Fake news or Not!? 
You see the problem!
Also, there have been a few positive impacts from the internet (it’s not all bad ).
Quite a big part of first 100 days measures were fairly technical. I suppose I’m more referring to stuff later in his first term: unemployment benefits, the Social Security Act, minimum wage and maximum working hours legislation, union recognition legislation and the so-called “soak the rich” 1935 Revenue Act. He wasn’t afraid to use populist language, e.g. talking about “economic tyranny”, “economic slavery” and “economic royalists” in his 1936 Democratic convention speech. Many of these measures must have been popular given his very large landslide victory that year to win his second presidential term. The threatened court packing was because of the earlier striking down of minimum wage and labour laws and New Deal institutions by the Supreme Court. Congress clipped his wings in terms of the New Deal his second term (why the court packing bill failed) but minimum wage legislation did get through. He was walking a tightrope. There were more extreme populists of various hues at the time (unsurprising given the era). They thought he didn’t go near far enough. Of course, a lot of the political establishment thought the New Deal went much too far. It was a balancing act as a line from that speech indicates:
These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power. Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power. In vain they seek to hide behind the flag and the Constitution. In their blindness they forget what the flag and the Constitution stand for. Now, as always, they stand for democracy, not tyranny; for freedom, not subjection; and against a dictatorship by mob rule and the over-privileged alike.
So a populist in the sense of the curbing of some elite interests and “economic royalists” but not in the overthrow of institutions or “dictatorship by mob rule”. IMO it was fortunate that the US had a politician at the time skillful enough to thread a middle way between these opposing forces (though the fact he was walking such middle ground means the answer as to whether he was a populist is inevitably not a clear-cut one). Fair enough if you don’t agree!
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I’m totally with you. It’s tricky, slippery, complex and all that, and there’s lot of historical context needed to understand both how we got here and how we move forward – if we decide to to do so. Finally (or just in time?), US legislators are doing some hard thinking about it. I pointed this out above, but no one clicked. 
Idk… should one?! Lol, scroll up… I said basically said the same thing in the same tone in an earlier post! And yet, dismissing such possibilities as naive may sound like wisdom but in fact be the opposite. A libertarian ethos prevails on the internet but in no other sphere of life, and the dissonance is proving toxic. In discussing the problem, we tend to revert to a false dichotomy: that the internet must be either Orwellian or anarchic, and we trot out ad absurdum arguments when we stake a claim. There’s a failure of imagination.
As for populism, it’s not that I agree or disagree with slapping that label on FDR, Sanders, Trump or any politician anywhere, I just don’t usually find it illuminating.
Sounds interesting but I think I must have exceed my quota of free NY Times articles for the month!
In a somewhat related topic, some countries sometimes ban fringe/extremist parties. It seems to have worked so far in Germany, but there you have a very respected institution, their constitutional court, making such decisions (and given their history, their public are probably rather sympathetic to the idea). However, it has been a very much abused approach in other places. As with everything, the referees are probably every bit as important as the rules.
Holding to the middle ground can be hard! For example, to me it seems that discussion groups on the internet are almost invariably either a chaotic free-for-all or are otherwise heavily moderated (this place being an exception of course but largely still possible because it is fairly small and the traffic is not too heavy). There’s a lot less effort in either heavily or lightly policing something. Some kind of happy medium would be ideal, but attaining that on very large busy forums would be very difficult and labour intensive (and the right balance hard to strike). Maybe sometimes either all or nothing are the easier to implement options (the dichotomy being rather easy than false)?
I think populism actually is really important to understand the bigger trends in American politics, and perhaps elsewhere. Populism is essentially taking the side of the “common person” and setting up “the elite” as a villain that’s dishonest and self-interested. The elite can mean different things, but basically it’s anyone in positions of authority. It could be intellectual authority like academia and the scientific community, political authority like political party leaders, and economic authority like big corporations and the Federal Reserve. Usually populists do this because they want to completely reform society in some way, so they have to attack the people at the top broadly and discredit them.
Older versions of populism would be movements like the French Revolution, the American Revolution, and Marxism. People put them on the political spectrum of right vs. left, but really they were assaults on the elite in general. Of course, it often got crazy when the populists became the elite. Then you ended up with counter revolutions and counter-counter revolutions to root out the allies of the former elite. Think Robespierre’s Reign of Terror, Stalin’s purges, and Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Populism gets crazy at times.
Anyway, though, in the US, we have this problem of conspiracy theories and delusional thinking in the political space because there was a successful assault on traditional media sources. A large part of the population assumes anything in mainstream news is lies and cover-ups. It seems that once people get into that line of thinking, it’s easy for them to fall into the rabbit holes.
Sanders was a populist in terms of the ultra-rich capitalist elite being his villains. Trump’s populism is a new kind of conservative populism that seeks to destroy the bureaucratic state and secularism. He’s very much a figurehead for the religious right that has been waging a culture war since the early 80s to reverse civil rights and secularism (which was part of a conflict goes back to the abolition movement and the Civil War). It’s weird that a man like him would end up in that position, but nearly half of us thought Trump was going to sweep away the corrupt political class once and for all. His campaign was very populist. His supporters still support him because they believe that’s his mission, and he’s locked in a struggle against the elite as their champion.
It’s pretty crazy to me. I researched him and knew a little bit about him back in 2016, and it was obvious he was a confidence man who games the system to stay relatively wealthy. He was the furthest we could get from a reformer. So many people fell for the story the Hillary Clinton represented the immoral political class that they bought into Trump being the good (or better) guy. And that’s how populism has taken over American politics. It was helped along by Americans never really having a clear idea what right and wrong really mean. We’re still fighting the Civil War in an semi-conscious way.
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Yes, exactly… Germany bans Nazism and forbids sales of Mein Kampf. This is the last time I’ll say this, but I pointed out precisely the same thing above. But anyway, it’s obviously possible to severely restrict by law certain forms of political speech and still have, by any reasonable standards, a free and fair society.
That’s exactly how it is. Just as a matter of fact, I would add that SC is actually pretty heavily moderated through both formal and informal means. It stands to reason since SC is a religious forum – nobody anywhere thinks they should be able to say whatever they feel like in church!
Crucially, this points out something very pertinent: on the internet, it takes a religious (or comparable) level of moderation to maintain an atmosphere of calm and mutual respect conducive to anonymous strangers discussing the most serious of topics. Facebook is pathetically incomparable, let alone 4chan, and as per the OP they are, by the standards of people involved in this discussion, bad. The inviolable right to anonymity on the internet is not without benefit to both individuals and society, but the damage it is doing to both individuals and society is, IMO, vastly outweighing the good.
So the solution, IMO – which is probably obvious at this point – is to severely restrict the right to anonymity, which is distinct from the rights of free thought, free speech and free assembly.
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I’m with you here, and appreciate your entire post. I don’t dismiss the concept of populism as devoid of meaning; after all, conflict and grievance between the haves and the have-nots has been intrinsic to all politics everywhere since the beginning of politics. Populism is a thing in US politics as much as it is anywhere, but I see it as a symptom of marked inequities in the distribution of wealth and power in a given society rather than a treatment. So in the context of constructive, solution-oriented conversation, I don’t find extended discussion of it to be particularly illuminating.
I’ll happily discuss the similarities in conditions between the 2010s and the 1930s, but that’s really for another thread, if not another forum.
Totally. Also interesting; also for another thread and/or forum.
I don’t mean to be be dismissive to anyone, but we have been warned by the Lords Protector of the Realm to stay on topic, and I’m trying my best to be a good little suttacentralist and heed them!
It’s actually painfully dry and dull and far less interesting than watching sausage get made, but if you really want to know more, here ya go:
https://judiciary.house.gov/uploadedfiles/competition_in_digital_markets.pdf
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I just wanted to thank everyone for their contributions, too many to respond to, but all interesting.
One thing tho:
You are absolutely right! The youngs should do their weird new thing, and the olds should shake their fists at it in pointless fury. That’s how the game is played.
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For those still interested, there’s a nice new interview by Cory Doctorow that discusses a lot of the fundamental issues with the direction tech has taken.
I’m not someone who says that the benefits aren’t real. We need to articulate the fact that the benefits should not be intrinsically linked to the harms. No one came down off a mount with two stone tablets saying thou shalt stop rotating log files and start mining for actionable market intelligence, right? Those are choices that people made. And you could make different choices. Sergey Brin was not dragged into spying on you by the forces of history. He made a choice. We could make a different one. If we remove the spying would you find the web searches less adorable?
(You should still totally delete your FB.)
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Bhante’s two posts will serve as a nice wrap up of this topic thread.