Online abuse: banning anonymous social media accounts is not the answer

Depends on the platform. On Reddit for example, I'd rather hear from the bots, trolls and sockpuppets.

There is one simple, easy way to stop abuse (both online and offline): stop accepting when your peers do it.

There are more people who think abusive behavior is bad than there are abusers who think it's good. If all the people who think it's bad call it out when they see it, avoid people who do it, make a point admonishing people who do it, refuse to accept working with people who do it at work, refuse to socialize with people who do it in social situations, refuse to watch TV shows where it's shown to be funny, refuse to pay to see it at the cinema, and so on then, eventually, it would start to stop.

Literally the only way to stop it is if society as a collective group makes it clear that it's not acceptable.

Sadly this means we're stuck with it.

Its offensive to me that if a white guy had stabbed anyone left of center, headlines would gleefully have rushed to announce far right/white supremacist terrorism, even prematurely; but when a white christian politician is targeted by a muslim immigrant, in a fucking church no less, not only do you not see "terrorism" in any headline, the vast majority of outlets fail to even describe the attacker beyond age and sex. Especially British publications.

I had suspected that it was a minority specifically because of the cryptic reporting of the incident, and it turns out you're right, now that a handful of US/international outlets have been willing to provide details.

And this article is part of a pattern of deflection. I watch Al Jazeera and they had the gall to interview three different minority MPs and heavily imply that minorities are being targeted.

This collective demonization of a global minority by western outlets, together with the gaslighting that whites (and especially white christians) aren't being targeted, is not going to end well. If you want to argue that its a deserved comeuppance that's one thing, but the way that these outlets implicitly collude to protect the identity of minority, and only minority attackers, is underhanded and dishonest.

"Anonymous" social media accounts can be tied back to a real person already a lot of the time. People are terrible about "doxing" themselves in places where pseudonyms are used. (Usually that's fine, since nobody is really out to get them and the sleuthing takes work.)

In the case of certain governments, the account owner is likely identifiable near 100% of the time, with not much effort.

Depending on what social media we're talking about, (and what corporations,) there may be corporations assembling pseudonym to identity mappings, too.

Making a law that forbids anonymity does help authoritarians, but it's mostly formalizing what is already an unspoken rule: that you can't truly be anonymous online. Other parties can throw away knowledge of you, like logless VPNs or TOR, but its next to impossible to verify they really do that.