>>12024
I had a discussion with a friend recently, just after El Paso, when a lot of media about 8chan have been published at once. He watched those and slowly started to come to a conclusion, that anonymity should be banned altogether. He is an anon (4chan and 8chan frequenter), but still I had to talk with him for a moment to remind and ensure him, that this situation was very likely a false flag and even if an anon committed that crime, it was due to a heavy (targeted) brainwashing he had to receive and the best course of action would be to go after those manipulators, not personal freedoms. After about 2 hours of almost shouting we came to understanding. Those media reports were hitting really hard and I have a great deal of sympathy to those that were manipulated by them.

One of the arguments I used in that conversation was that anonymity can be compared to a person asking you for directions. You are pretty much anonymous at that point. You can intentionally direct a person to a wrong location - why do you choose not to do that? After all, there's no consequence of doing so. The thesis I derived from that is that anonymity works if most (unsure about the qualifier) of the community is to use it in a good faith. But it's an argument about freedom in general. I can think about a lot of theoretical communities or individuals that don't deserve any freedom at all.