alt Hacker NewsCorrect.
The choice is between democracy and our current ever worsening sociopolitical hellscape.
If eliminating bots and sockpuppets is the price for restoring some semblance of democracy, then gosh darn.
And if social media, targeted ads, and algorithmic hate machines are collateral damage, than gee double gosh darn.
Those sacrifices are a price I'm willing to pay.
> "Democracy" is when "bad actors" (as defined by the establishment) are shut out of all online discourse.
The point of ID laws is not to stop "bots" or "sockpuppets", it's to enable governments to shut down the speech of their political adversaries by painting them as dangerous. That is not democracy, that is authoritarianism, even if you absolutely hate the people that are being shut up.
Western countries are not in the midst of polarized political crises because of "external bad actors" or "sockpuppets". They're in these crises because of fundamental contradictions in values and desired policies between different segments of the populace.
The Europeans are currently full steam ahead in attempting to "fix" the situation by criminalizing dissent, which will, in the end, only exacerbate the political crisis by making the democratic system illegitimate.