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Comment by FellowTraveler | Hacker News Reader

In Mexico, bloggers are disemboweled and strung up from bridges as a warning to others, by cartels.

In Syria, government snipers murdered bloggers to silence them.

In China, bloggers are imprisoned at hard labor.

In the United States, the Federalist Papers were released anonymously in order to protect the lives of their authors.

It is only the spoiled, rich and free countries who make such naive and irresponsible statements such as, "I am in support of people using their real names online."

A better question is, what actions are Google, Apple, and Facebook taking to protect our vital ability to remain anonymous online?

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Great post. I am in South Korea. I could be imprisoned for the the things I have written here about Samsung and their owning family.

In Thailand you could be imprisoned if anything you say can be misconstrued as a criticism of the King.

This kinds of laws that make all kinds of utterly harmless speech a very serious risk are very widespread.

See also what happened to some poor guy that made a joke in Twitter about his trip to the US.

People in favor of "Real Names" are the same kind of people who say "If you have nothing to hide, why do you care about privacy?"

In Thailand you could be imprisoned if anything you say can be misconstrued as a criticism of the King.

I've heard that is also true in Memphis.

…but you haven't.

These are valid points. But there are myriad ways to blog anonymously. If Facebook wants to be a place where people are known by their real names, then that's their business.

Wouldn't an even better question be: how do we build the kind of society where people can express their thoughts attached to their names without fear of reprisal?

The way forward, in my view, is not acceptance, but a complete separation of individuals and ideas.

Yes, but that's going to take 100+ years. It's is not an argument in favour of real names only, today.

A noble sentiment, but until it can be proven with solid evidence that such a thing is possible, it would be dangerous and irresponsible to force such an experiment upon people.

History is rife with examples of people imposing what they just KNEW was right upon others, with disastrous consequences.

That's an interesting point, perhaps the goal I described is impossible. It just seems like aiming for anonymity is aiming low and solving the wrong problem.

Or perhaps it is aiming high and solving the right problem. Unless one can back up their claims with good evidence, they're merely engaging in conjecture. Thus far, the only evidence we have points in favor of preserving the right to privacy and anonymity.

It's an appealing idea but I don't believe we're wired for it. "Busybody" and "judgmental" and "heretic" have been in the lexicon for many centuries. We evolved in tribes and villages which were too hierarchical and interdependent to tolerate freethinkers and too small (below Dunbar's number) for eccentrics to escape notice. It's the relative anonymity of cities, and the opportunity to reinvent oneself, that unleashed the rate of progress we see today.

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