I really do think we could neuter social media’s harm by requiring them to positively identify users as actual people or own the consequences of what gets posted - like how a newspaper has the legal accountability for what it says. This “neutral platform” is not healthy for our democracy.

I’m all for freedom of speech - but I don’t think those freedom of speech laws had anticipated how wide the damage of speech can flow and how stealthily things can be spoken.

And it’s not hard to set up. The EU’s new identity network requires zero-knowledge-proofs - ie “this is a real person” is all that social media platforms would be able to verify. I’d obviously be deeply against the social media companies being able to positively identify users.

But I usually get downvoted to oblivion for making this point.