zlacker

I feel a divide w.r.t. this topic. I'm old now and grew up when the internet was full of small groups of nerds. People knew each other (rarely by name), often times you weren't identifiable at all. You made friends strictly on the content of your character and clout chasing wasn't really a big thing. Even in hacker circles "clout chasing" was mocked.

Around the time social media emerged all of this changed. People started voluntarily using their real names and photos. They share intimate details about their life to complete strangers. They demand attention, they want to be noticed, they want a "record". It's trivial to piece together enough across anyones social media accounts to pin point where they live, possibly where they travel (sometimes daily), etc.

Subsequently we have children who are being born and raised by this system. It makes sense to me to fence these kids away from the internet. I take the more extreme stance of fencing children away from the entire internet until at least they're teens but I have also watched it turn from a place where you can learn to a very dangerous place for anyone not smart enough to remain anonymous.

Should the federal or state government regulate this? I don't know. What I do know is every bit of data on education. child rearing, health, etc have shown that the average person in the west is completely and utterly incapable of rearing children. Someone has to step in. We are getting to be past the point "it's the parents responsibility" works when the second and third order effects dramatically shift society and it's culture. Either we begin severely punishing parents for failures to thrive (e.g. prison time) or we enact laws like this. I am not against the idea of putting parents in prison for child neglect for their iPad kid, and investigating and potentially removing children from a home when their grades in school have a pattern of being excruciatingly poor despite intervention.

Legislators have a far easier time legislating ID laws than child neglect laws, however, and these ID laws are easier to swallow given existing infrastructure.

>>stuffn+(OP)
From my experience it's the opposite. On the old internet, forums, newsgroups, people willingly used their real names to communicate with strangers. They treated the internet as an extension of real life where of course you use your real name, what else?

Nowadays, using your real name is dangerous, lest you get swatted or an angry mob decides to get you fired because you made an off-color joke. Doxxing someone is viewed as a potentially violent act. It's hard to imagine anyone using their real name on Discord for instance, whereas in the days of IRC it was common.

>>zarzav+87
Huh. I may be younger than you are. By the time I got online in the early to mid-nineties the very strong zeitgeist was never to use your real name, nor to post identifying details into (the resultingly anonymized) fora. This was the "on the internet no one knows you're a dog" era, which cartoon (I just looked it up) was from 1993 - way earlier than I'd have guessed!

Social media - starting with the very early ones: Six Degrees, Friendster, maybe MySpace? - weakened that expectation, but (someone tell me if this is accurate) my recollection is that Facebook was the first platform to require realname accounts. I agree with you about the current danger, and though I've never posted anything anywhere that I wouldn't stand behind - trolling just isn't my style - I have, reflecting the pov of my "internet generation", always felt super weird publicly posting anything under my real name.