The Washington Post has published an op-ed of truly magnificent stupidity (and, incidentally, gratingly twee prose) today, decrying the platform the Internet provides for anonymous speech:

In any community in America, if Mr. anticrat424 refused to identify himself, he would be ignored and frozen out of the civic problem-solving process. But on the Internet, Mr. anticrat424 is continually elevated to the podium, where he can have his angriest thoughts amplified through cyberspace as often as he wishes. He can call people the vilest names and that hate-mongering, too, will be amplified for all the world to see.

Yes, there’s surely no place for anonymous speech in the public sphere envisioned by Founders like Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Paine, or James Madison. Surely in their more enlightened times, nobody hiding behind a pseudonym could have had any political influence.

What’s most bizarre about this piece is how incredibly superfluous it seems. Like the idea of accountable discussion forums, where every idea is linked to a verifiable real name? Well, there are plenty of those already. Worried about people “hate-mongering” or calling each other “the vilest names”? There’s no reason a site can’t limit that behavior while preserving pseudonymity, and indeed, so long as there are some people who don’t care about being hateful under their own names, that seems like a better way to address the problem. And the author’s imagination is so grossly impoverished that the only legitimate reason he can imagine to permit the use of a nom de Net is for the protection of whistleblowers, for whom he’ll grant sites ought to make exceptions on a “case-by-case basis.”

Fortunately, this sort of “transparency” has precisely no chance of becoming the general rule, for precisely the same reason the op-ed misapprehends the problem from the outset. Pseudonymous speakers are not “elevated to the podium”—note how the passive voice obfuscates as well as any handle—we elevate or ignore them when we decide what to read, how much credence to give it, and whose views to link and propagate in our own writing. Indeed, the “podium” metaphor—as though the Internet were a big room in which we all sit and listen to whomever’s got the mic for the next five minutes—is a pretty good early warning signal for the cluelessness that pervades the piece. Fora for anonymous speech are common because lots of people like them, because the annoyance of filtering out the boors is, for many of us, dwarfed by the benefit of having the freedom to air your views without worrying about what Bob in HR or Aunt Hortense would think if they came across them on Google. And even though some of the more prominent formerly-pseudonymous bloggers—Jane Galt and Atrios, say—have since ditched their masks (though Manolo remains a mystery), I’d bet theres a significant proportion of both their daily readers who wouldn’t even recognize the names “Megan McArdle” or “Duncan Black.” Why? Because when you’re making a cogent argument based on verifiable facts, supported by links, and with equal openness for others to poke holes in the argument or link contradictory information, the names of the people involved just don’t matter a whole lot. When the ideas and arguments are transparent, identities don’t need to be.