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RE: [Dear Steemit] An Open Letter to Steemit Inc.
I'm against KYC as my anonymity protects my freedom of speech and having my real name attached to my account would greatly decrease the amount of topics I could write about. I would have to start censoring myself.
Thanks for giving me your reason, first to kinda quantify it! What makes you say that though? What kind of topics would you be unable to talk about? I can understand someone from a country like China needing to take such things into consideration, but we live in countries where freedom of speech exists.
I really appreciate your perspective.
My government can and sometimes does limit its citizens' freedom of expression. Its written right in Canada's Charter with the terminology so broad that all that needs to be done is have a law passed through the Supreme Court to limit rights.
Also, just because it may be ok to speak on a certain topic now, doesn't mean that it will also be ok to talk about it in the future. Anything posted especially on blockchain technology will last a long time. My concern is that we may get in trouble for something that was written previously years before.
My PM and his ministers has already labelled Canadians questioning the course of the current government as Islamophobic, deplorable and unCanadian. What happens when it goes beyond name-calling?
That takes away religion, politics, news, NWO, immigration, philosophy and opinion as topics.
There is also the issue of freedom of association. There is an old saying that mentions that "birds of a feather, flock together which means that people tend to form groups and spend plentiful time with people who resemble them and are much alike them, or have similar tastes, traits and moral qualities. While this is not necessarily true, I can imagine one being judged by who are their steemit friends.
Next there is the concern of the possible retribution of one's employer. The division between one's work and private life is getting ever-increasingly blurred. It's getting to the point that a company's codes of conduct controls one's life outside of the office.
That fear takes away even more topics to discuss. Finance and crypto-currency come too mind.
My thoughts are that we have the right to be anonymous when online. Anonymity is necessary in a free society. In the US, anonymity of penmanship of political articles is one of the cornerstones that formed the structure of their country (see The Federalist Papers). The purpose was to avoid personalities and personal attacks upon the authors. A person disagreeing with an anonymous statement could not attack it by saying that the author was corrupt, rather the person had to respond to the arguments made in the publication. This idea still holds true today. Every freedom has a price that must be paid, internet trolls, while annoying and tedious, are a very reasonable price to pay for the freedom of expressing an idea without fear of reprisal or detraction from substance.
I believe that there is a way to remove/silence the trolls without removing anonymity which is a reason that I joined steemit. Removing the flagging feature from users until they receive a certain rep level may help.
Anyway, those are my thoughts on the subject. I appreciate the opportunity to share my perspective. Thanks.