> The Discord app, which allows users to chat anonymously with one another, was allegedly used to organize the Charlottesville violence.
If they found her then it would seem discord isn't really anonymous?
> (Last year, the app kicked a number of white supremacists off the platform, attempting to return to its original target audience of gamers.)
How do the kick people off an anonymous platform? Seems they would have to identify them first.
Anyway, I normally come down on the free speech side of things, but this person seems to have been inciting violence and that is a very sensible place to draw the line on where free speech ends. Instead of trying to remove her anonymity why aren't they charging her directly?
They're anonymous with one another if they want, just like most of the internet pre-Facebook. Discord still has their email and IP, and possibly their phone number.
Inciting violence (some of this planned violence is couched in self-defense terms) might be a sensible place to draw the line on free speech, but in Brandenburg v. Ohio the Supreme Court defined that as being likely to cause "imminent lawless action". In other words, "someone ought to take revenge on [person]" is legal, but "there's [person], time to get him!" is not. However, that was almost 50 years ago, and I'd make the case that speech on the internet is more likely to cause imminent lawless action because of its reach.
This lawsuit is a civil conspiracy suit, not a criminal charge. I can't find the actual filing but I imagine that unmasking people could be a part of delineating the conspirators and uncovering any additional relationships between them.
It's not an anonymous platform. You sign up with a username, email and password like anything else, there just isn't a requirement to supply a phone number, photo ID or similar. What they mean is Discord just banned the user accounts and groups and called it a day, because trying to enforce a ban like that is infeasible.
