The Names Story

It's a page-four type story and not likely to be noticed by many Germans.....which ARD (German public TV, Channel One) put out.

The Bundestag....via it's President Schäuble (CDU)....has picked up the old topic of social media and forcing people to use their real names. 

The deal would be....if the law were drafted and passed, that you could only be active on German social media.....if you used your real name.

Why?  They feel it would be so much easier in tracking hate-speech, and that the world would be a safer and more civilized space.

So you start off and ask.....how would Facebook or Twitter ensure your name request for an account were true?  The answer?  You would click on the page update and add your true name, then an email would go to your email account, which also has your true name, to certify it.  The ways to get around this?  I can think of at least a dozen ways, and you could easily end up with 44,000 Angela Merkels existing, with the corresponding email accounts.

If you were to start your fake account while on vacation to the US?  Well, that would be another problem in this 'control-the net' scheme.

This idea that the social media business can be finely controlled?  For an entire decade, this has been discussed by people, and virtually every single scheme has failed.  Unless you were forced to go down to some county office or city hall in Germany, presenting your German ID card, and register via some Facebook/Twitter executive there....that's about the only way that some gimmick would work.

The idea that being anonymous drives people to hate-speech?  Prove it.  There's no study existing which could make that statement with any factual data.

Defining hate-speech in Germany?  You could ask a hundred Germans in some pub, and you'd likely get one-hundred variations of the answer.  Some would likely grin and suggest that you'd be a Nazi-type....if you use hate-speech.  Some might even suggest that German 'bluntness' (legendary in scale) might be severe hate-speech, that is readily accepted across the whole nation.

The odds that this will become a political topic for the 2021 national election?  Maybe, but it'll be deemed by the general public as a fairly non-topic.