This messaging is so grim and terrible that it couldn’t have been an accident.
Even I hadn’t seen this one coming, and I’m pretty pessimistic about government involvement in social media. Essentially, some people want to make anonymous accounts illegal. That’s a vast amount of content, some of it the most useful we have.
This would essentially spell the end of the internet as we know it and replace it with a full-time surveillance state. Many of the best and most impactful Substacks would disappear, along with X accounts, plus everything else. And what’s “social media”? Does it include comments on articles in The Epoch Times? Why not?
The surveillance state has already demotivated the use of real names. Why make yourself a target? Pseudonyms have never been as necessary as they are now.
The obvious next step, if you’re of a Chinese Communist Party/Orwellian mindset, is to force all social media companies to require a real ID from every single user. I’m not sure what this would imply for companies, nonprofits, causes, and groups; it could make their postings illegal, too.
It’s actually quite astonishing that Ms. Haley went there and then doubled down once questioned about this. Of course, it seems to have massively harmed her campaign, but there was zero hope for that anyway. So she was tagged, or tagged herself, to be the first public political person in the United States to go the full way and demand a complete end to anonymous and pseudonymous posting on the internet.
The proposal comes from a Republican, which is consistent with the triangulation strategy. It’s far better for hideous expansions of government power to come from quarters where they’re least expected. That way, the base will be confused and vaguely warmed to the idea, and the Overton window is subtly shifted to make the unthinkable newly possible.
How important are anonymous accounts on social media? Hugely important. Vast amounts of the essential breaking news and analysis come from them. These days, unless you want to be labeled an enemy of the state, audited, and harassed, it’s absolutely necessary. Culling them and forbidding them would leave only mainstream news as controlled by government.
This is a consideration not just in our own time. Following the American Revolution, there was a huge debate in this country over whether to draft a Constitution that would effectively create a new structure for the government. The result was what we call The Federalist Papers. They’re cited constantly in court cases and all civics books. Indeed, we couldn’t possibly understand the whole idea of being American under the Constitution without them.
Here’s the key: Everyone who wrote what’s now called The Federalist Papers did so anonymously. The collection features fully 45 pseudonyms. To this date, there remains uncertainty. Why did they do this? There was no war, no censorship, no threat. The point is that they were advancing a controversial position and didn’t want to land on the wrong side of history.
The names they chose also reflected an ideal of the Roman Republic. They were names such as Agrippa, Brutus, Cato, Cincinnatus, Crito, Marcus, Publius, and Tilius, in addition to more localized names, such as A Citizen of America, A Countryman, and Federal Farmer. If the government of the Articles of Confederation had adopted the Haley rule, The Federalist Papers would never have been written.
Another factor is that by choosing pseudonyms, they hoped to make their arguments more compelling on their own terms, rather than allowing critics to dismiss them as interested parties who attended the Constitutional Convention. They were trying to avoid the ad hominem argument, such as “Madison is nothing but a landowner seeking to shore up his estate,” and so on.
Some of the greatest works of literature were published anonymously, from “Beowulf” to “Common Sense” to “Frankenstein.” Even now, the most informative book on vaccines I’ve read (“Turtles All the Way Down”) is anonymous.
In other words, this demand for new levels of surveillance is really a demand for censorship and is an attack on the Constitution itself. Does she know this? Maybe, but she doesn’t really care. Freedom isn’t really a relevant consideration.
All of which raises a more profound point. It has been a very long time in American political history since considerations of freedom for Americans have been a priority. The last time might have been during the Reagan administration, which at least had a coherent governing philosophy. The issue of freedom faded through two Bush administrations, the Clinton administration, and President Barack Obama. President Obama was erudite and clever and could yammer on for hours in transcribable content. But freedom itself clearly wasn’t in his mind. If the words ever left his mouth, it was a line from a speechwriter—a slogan and nothing more.
Freedom means to enshrine human volition as a central principle, rooted in the idea that anyone should be able to speak and act in any way provided they don’t harm others. That proviso, however, is subject to great abuse. Ms. Haley, for example, says anonymous accounts are harming national security. By that she means not your well-being but the health of the state. The state wants everyone’s identity and wants to know everywhere you are and everything you do.
We’re further along this path already than most people realize. The retinal scanners at the airport are now common. Our smartphones track our whereabouts constantly. Turning off that setting—euphemistically called “location services” when it really means surveillance—proves very difficult if not impossible. Just last month, the federal government sent a test alarm to everyone’s phones to make sure you remember who’s in charge.
Social media companies already have embedded federal agents or proxies working throughout, coding the apps and deboosting unpermitted thought. There are growing dangers that email is monitored and so is browsing. People are mostly unaware of this, but it’s a reality. A private window means almost nothing, and VPNs are themselves being criticized as a threat to the commonwealth.
Again, where’s the concern for freedom, which also implies some measure of digital privacy? These issues are simply being driven out of our public debate. During the lockdowns, concern over freedom was openly ridiculed. Now, whatever freedoms we have remaining are under daily and existential assault.
Already, the internet is far less free than it was 10 years ago. There are so many outposts of government control that masquerade as “fact-checkers” or disinterested observers. We have all the evidence we need to prove that social media is already in the act of censoring for the feds. This proposal to end anonymity just takes it to the next overtly totalitarian level.
Yes, Ms. Haley was shot down, but her strategy worked. The very notion is now floated and being debated, requiring articles such as this one. They’re trying to wear us down so that eventually, we relent and give up our rights completely.
