Is anonymity helpful for political discourse?

 This week, the New York Times interviewed Tyler Blevins, aka Ninja, the popular Fortnite streamer.  In the casual perusing of the article that I did, one statement kind of stuck with me.  It seems indicative of the political issue we are seeing come to the fore.

Ninja talks"I don’t think it’s gaming. I think it’s internet culture. People are behind the screen. They say what they want and can get away with it. You have complete anonymity. Your information and data are precious and should remain private, but it sucks that there are kids who can say racist things and be incredibly aggressive and threatening to women online and have zero repercussions."

This for me brings up a number of conflicting emotions and issues facing politics and people in general.  One is the ability to be anonymous period.  Being at the forefront of any controversial issue in this day and age=death threats.  That's just the way it is.  Also, doxxing and swatting are very real threats that have generated whole discussions of their own.

Swatting 

Doxxing

But some people have pushed back in favor of anonymity on the web.  The argument for it is that whistleblowers and journalists, as well as citizen journalists, use that as a tool to protect themselves, and it is essential for a check on governments.  

Ultimately, I really don't know where I fall on this issue.  I can see the arguments on both sides.  I think it will come down to the individual hosters of forums, the Twitters of the world.  Will you allow anonymity, or must you link your account to your person?

Vaccine worries, a function of the media?

 Source: https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/21/politics/cnn-poll-coronavirus-vaccine/index.html

    For the first time today, 66% of Americans polled say that they will take the coronavirus vaccine if offered.  This marks a marked change from sentiments over the past few weeks.  Since the first polls came out indicating that a majority of Americans were worried about, or even refused to, take the vaccine I had wondered if this was a function of "Anti-Vax".  Anti-Vax is a movement, widely believed to be propagated on YouTube, that promotes the idea that you shouldn't vaccinate yourself or your children, to prevent possible adverse effects, usually autism.  The type of environment that YouTube created through their algorithm made this type of idea popular, and the popularity of this idea had real world consequences, measles. 

There haven't been any major studies to suggest this, it was just something that had been rolling around in my head.  I was thinking media was influencing people's personal politics in a bad way.

However, the reverse seems to actually be the case.  When the coronavirus vaccine was given emergency approval by the FDA a number of major politicians and celebrities did photoshoots of them receiving the vaccine.  This seems to be a major factor in the change in public opinion we are seeing.

"46% says it’s possible they would do so once others start getting vaccinated and more information becomes available."

I think people seeing their heroes take the vaccine, is giving it a credibility boost.  I think the media is influencing people's politics in a positive way.  

But we will just have to wait and see if history views it that way.

Parler punches back, accusing first amendment violations and anti-trust

 After the events that took place at Capitol Hill, there was of course going to be hell to pay.  On January 6th, what can only be described as a riot took place, with citizens unhappy with the certification of Joe Biden as president storming the Hill.  While this will certainly go down in the annals of history, the thing that I wanted to talk about was the blowback.  In the wake of this, Donald Trump was impeached for the second time by the House of Representatives(the first time in history), and Parler, the social media site for conservatives, was essentially blacklisted.  Removed from the Apple store and the Google play store, and it's Amazon owned servers shut down, many people cried out that it was the silencing of free speech.  This is the newest flavor of the same conversation that has been had since Ajit Pai took office, or Milo Yiannopolus got deplatformed.  Are social media sites private companies, who can make their own rules?  Or is this the new version of the town square, Free Speech 2.0?  Does our current interpretation of the first amendment cover all that it should, and is it possible for those behemoths to moderate all the content on their platform?

Riot 

Parler CEO on deplatforming