Columnist Anne Applebaum writes in Slate and the Washington Post:

The Trolls Among Us If you want to comment on this article, you shouldn’t be allowed to be anonymous. By Anne Applebaum If you are reading this article on the Internet, stop afterward and think about it. Then scroll to the bottom and read the comments. Then recheck your views. Chances are your thinking will have changed, especially if you have read a series of insulting, negative, or mocking remarks—as so often you will. Once upon a time, it seemed as if the Internet would be a place of civilized and open debate; now, unedited forums often deteriorate into insult exchanges.

Personally, I put in a huge amount of time reading comments in order to have a high quality comments section. I would have a low quality comments section if I required real names. For example, who reads the New York Times Letters to the Editor anymore? The NYT always insisted upon real names, ideally from people with official credentials. And you wound up with snoozeville.

I get paid back in that I get many excellent comments that I can uh borrow ideas from. I particularly like critical comments pointing out flaws in arguments I put forward, since I am the truest true believer in thesis-antithesis-synthesis progress.

Like it or not, this matters: Multiple experiments have shown that perceptions of an article, its writer, or its subject can be profoundly shaped by anonymous online commentary, especially if it is harsh. One group of researchers found that rude comments “not only polarized readers, but they often changed a participant’s interpretation of the news story itself.” A digital analyst at Atlantic Media also discovered that people who read negative comments were more likely to judge that an article was of low quality and, regardless of the content, to doubt the truth of what it stated. …

While this is a problem for individuals holding the Megaphone, why this is a problem for the rest of because …

States have grown interested in joining the fray as well. Last year Russian journalists infiltrated an organization in St. Petersburg that pays people to post at least 100 comments a day; an investigation this past summer found that a well-connected businessman was paying Russian trolls to manage 10 Twitter accounts with up to 2,000 followers.

A government that actively engages in social media hasbara is Israel. Here’s a Haaretz story about Israel’s covert online system that recruits college students. I have my doubts about whether Israel’s operation works in terms of quantity, but perhaps it’s really intended more to identify quality: the next generation of individuals good at generating popular memes.

My guess is that Israel’s system is good for identifying and then recruiting talented young propagandists into the establishment. This helps them avoid what I call the Tracey Ullman Problem. For three decades, Tracey Ullman has impressed television executives as a brilliant sketch comedienne. And for three decades, nobody else noticed. It’s not just that the general public is barely aware of her, it’s also that the buzz-generating elements of the culture are barely aware of her too.

So now institutions have quantitative ways to overcome the problem that their leaders tend to have better taste than their intended audiences.

Anyway, paid hasbara coming out of Israel or Russia worries me less than the hasbara being generated for free in America by the Volunteer Auxiliary Thought Police. Who are these people? No, don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.

Sooner or later, we may also be forced to end Internet anonymity, or at least to ensure that every online persona is linked back to a real person: Anyone who writes online should be as responsible for his words as if he were speaking them aloud.

Fortunately, we live in a culture that values freedom of expression above all else, and would never wreck anybody’s career over an unpopular statement.

I know there are arguments in favor of anonymity, but too many people now abuse the privilege. Human rights, including the right to freedom of expression, should belong to real human beings, and not to anonymous trolls.

Establishment columnist annoyed by little people mouthing off: film at 11.

But as a step toward more openness on the Internet, shouldn’t Anne Applebaum’s columns in the Washington Post and Slate come with a tagline noting that her husband and the father of her children is the Foreign Minister of a NATO member with 120,000 active military personnel and reserves of 515,000?

Update: one of those horrible Anonymous Commenters notes in my comments that Radosław Sikorski has recently been demoted from Foreign Minister to Marshal of the Sejm, which, whatever it is, still sounds pretty cool.

One reason was the bugging of Sikorski’s not very diplomatic private conversations. Who exactly bugged the now ex-Foreign Minister’s conversation remains murky, but it seems to be a pattern lately that enemies of Vladimir Putin get publicly embarrassed. Sikorski has gotten in trouble for things like calling the people of Poland “Negro slave-brained” and for this oldy but goody:

‘Have you heard that Obama may have a Polish connection? His grandfather ate a Polish missionary.’

Radosław sounds like a fun guy. He can comment here anonymously, although he should go easy on the Obamannibal jokes. You know what would be ironic? If Ms. Applebaum gets her way and the NSA exposes the secret identities of all anonymous / pseudonymous Internet commenters, and it turns out her husband Rad is actually Terrapin Gape et al.