I want future generations to have the power of anonymity, that some use that anonmyity for something I disagree with is precisely why I think it might be worth preserving.
There’s a difference between writing anonymously and assuming a false identity.
It's not enabling speaking truth to power. It's letting the already powerful dictate the perception of truth.
I wish there were public studies like, 'We ran an experiment where young, attractive women wearing Polish clothing caused people who would naturally express these ideologies to stop scrolling more often than young, attractive women not wearing Polish clothing, for x demographic"
But to the extent that it might have been different, the many incompatible visions for it that gridlocked UK politics might have coalesced into a single vision, and while that would still have been worse than not having done Brexit as all, it might have been less bad than five mutually incompatible visions that got brushed under the carpet long enough to make it happen only by Boris Johnson promising all things to all people.
OTOH, things can be much much worse than Brexit. Musk's tweets about civil war in the UK, his willingness to support people too far right to even be in the most far-right of the top 8 polling parties, what Grok calls itself…
On that kind of theme, there's a psych study, Robbers Cave, worth reading about. Also note some summaries fail to mention that both groups resented being manipulated by the researchers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realistic_conflict_theory#Robb...
A lot of "speech" online isn't real humans voicing their opinions and having civilized discourse.
It's nation states and moneyed interests weaponizing our naïveté, using what are meant to be public squares as means of disseminating propaganda and dividing our societies.
People arguing for unrestricted free speech online are either complicit (e.g. Musk) or naive and being taken advantage of.