In the same way that if a democracy elects an authoritarian then it stops being a democracy; by not respecting the rights of its citizens in the name of a political expedient.
The goal isn’t, at least not publicly, but the methods are.
But then again, authoritarians almost never come out and say “we intend to control every aspect of our citizens lives in order to maintain power”; rather they find some convenient fig leaf to hide behind.
And such is the same with your proposal; you’re advocating for greater government control over personal lives in the name of protecting citizens from other governments. Authoritarian shit, full stop.
You keep saying authoritarian a lot but you don't seen to have any logical arguments on why the proposed solution is bad. How on earth is preventing users from making 1000s of bots and influencing the public consensus bad for the democracy? I don't work for government. I don't want random people with 1000sof bots to manipulate the people around me and turn the democracy into a shitshow. I don't know how the tech companies will do it. But there should be only 1 account per person. 1 persons voice should not be worth 1000 times the voice of other people. That is not democracy.
I don't really care if two of the authors, bloggers or philosophers I follow happen to secretly be the same person, writing under pseudonyms. There being two identities doesn't make their voice count more.
If manipulating an automated system in this way makes your voice “count more”, there's a deeper problem.
You could simply force users to solve complex human CAPTCHAs if they want to post. Then sybil or bot attack becomes impossible, because there is a limit to how many trucks or bicycles any one user can recognize per day. Current methods of verifying ID would still exist, for users with accessibility issues that make it hard for them to solve CAPTCHAs.
> You keep saying authoritarian a lot but you don't seen to have any logical arguments on why the proposed solution is bad.
I do, you've either misunderstood them or ignored them. I will explain it again thoroughly.
I have no problem with your proposed goals, I take great issue with the means by which you would try and reach them. This is why "what's so wrong with <goal>?" arguments are utterly unpersuasive; you're completely ignoring the bits that I'm objecting to. It's not sufficient that you propose this to "save" democracy, as all policies good and bad come paired up with desirable (or at least popular) goals. If "we're doing this for a good reason" was sufficient, we'd be forced to conclude that there has never been a bad policy ever, which is of course ridiculous.
Your proposal involves using the power of the state to control who can and cannot talk online, and to curtail where citizens can exercise their right of free speech. This is fundamentally an authoritarian proposal, as it is the state coming in to directly control the free speech right of its citizens. That this is done to "save democracy" has a "we were forced to destroy the village in order to save it" feeling to it.
Aside from the blatant unconstitutionality of what you propose, there are two concrete issues; chilling effects and scope creep.
Serious thinkers in this area, including the judiciary, talk about the "chilling effects" that governmental action can have on free speech. Even if the government doesn't explicitly ban X or Y speech, actions it takes can have the effect of dissuading people from saying certain things. It is not hard to see how a restriction on anonymous speech would be chilling, would people not be more hesitant to criticize the government if they could not do so anonymously? With the recent debates over "cancel culture", is it not obvious that some people would prefer to express controversial ideas under a pseudonym? The courts certainly agree that anonymity is required to avoid chilling effects as "anonymity may be motivated by fear of economic or official retaliation, by concern about social ostracism, or merely by a desire to preserve as much of one's privacy as possible" (McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Commission).
Secondly, remember that any power you give the government will be eventually wielded by someone you do not like. It does not take an overactive imagination how the ability to ban websites "for the sake of democracy" would be eventually abused by a politician. History is littered of examples where emergency powers are eventually abused to erode the rule of law they were proposed to save; we should try and avoid such obvious mistakes moving forward.
> 1 persons voice should not be worth 1000 times the voice of other people. That is not democracy.
It seems to me that you might not actually understand what democracy actually is. Are we not a democracy because there are celebrities who have (far) more than 1,000x the reach that you or I have? Are we not a democracy because some people can go on TV to persuade, while others cannot?
No. Democracy always was about equal access to the vote, not equal access to an audience.
