Online identity and policy; won't somebody think of the children?!?!

Every so often, you hear a politician try and come up with a solution to the duopoly that is our childlike anonymous online self. I read an article today about one such politician. The proposal is that you must provably identify yourself online so that you can be punished if you misbehave. The article suggests that billionaire tech founders have control over the vast usage of their platform and should be willing to impose draconian measures to prevent harm from befalling on their end users.

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Pardon me while I go off hunting for memes about people being mean on the internet.

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To anyone implementing these crazy notions, I warn you: watch your Daily Active Users go crashing. My children are 9 and 12 years old... They will use social networks poorly, and there are many, many millions of other pre-teenage children on the internet with brand new internet IDs. Ask them for proof, and they'll use your competitor. Facebook has 1.45B DAU (source), but website Reddit recently surpassed (source) Facebook as the number 3 website on the internet - behind Google and YouTube. As much as the UK PM is right that what is illegal offline is also illegal online, violence is something which has an offline presence. There is no easy button, and your citizens won't stand for putting microphones in their homes -- I use a Google Home, but that's only because I'm foolishly trusting in big G as a target with too much to lose if they should violate enough end user trust. As an American, I don't trust the government (of any country) to set the rules. The internet is some kind of virtual world, where not all the inhabitants are human, and not all humans are who they pretend to be, nor are they connecting from where you think they are.

So what can be done, and what is being done in this space? Well, I don't want to be a pessimist and say that nothing can be done - there is some extent to which we are talking about whac-a-mole (an arcade game which represents a futile effort at making a lasting change). There are interesting efforts - one that I've recently been made aware of is named Perspective - part of Google's Jigsaw - which attempts to discern harassment from conversations. The ultimate problem is that no one country can control its people online. Online is a big place. It is the wild west, but that's also part of the draw.