Your Real Name, Please
I’ve lost count of how many times accounts like Bernd161, xXxMurDersTAr99xXx, or _Dein_Mama_FOZT_y_ have called me a son of a whore, a cuck, or worse in comment sections. Sometimes you scroll past it. Sometimes it’s actually funny. Sometimes it lands and you spend three minutes staring at the ceiling wondering what you’re doing with your life.
In China, starting in October, you’ll know exactly who’s behind those usernames. Anonymous comments are banned. Under the new real-name policy, users can only post under their legal identities—which, for the state’s censorship apparatus, makes the work of identifying and silencing vocal dissidents considerably easier. The regulation comes from China’s top internet authority and applies to every platform where users can leave comments. Platforms must either implement identity verification or shut down their comment sections entirely.
It’s the same playbook as Turkey, where the volume of government-critical tweets and Instagram posts dropped sharply after the 2016 coup attempt because people understood that speaking freely might mean a prison cell or a mob outside their building. China isn’t trying to make its internet a nicer place—it’s trying to make dissent legible and therefore punishable.
The regulation also instructs platforms to rate users based on their comment history and block those who attract negative attention. Those scores would reportedly be passed to the authorities, which creates a strong incentive for platform operators to preemptively delete anything that looks critical and ban users before they become a problem. Political censorship, outsourced to the private sector. Clean hands all around.
And it goes further than comments. China is building a nationwide social credit system—a scoring mechanism that rewards compliant citizens with better loan rates, career opportunities, and assorted perks, while those who cause trouble pay for it financially and socially. Behave, get rewarded. Complain, get blacklisted. The feedback loop is explicit and the stakes are real.
A few weeks ago, China also banned VPNs—the tools people use to circumvent the Great Firewall—and pressured Apple into pulling VPN apps from the Chinese App Store. The walls are going up, the exits are closing, and the surveillance grid is getting finer. Whether the party around Xi Jinping will achieve the level of control it’s reaching for is the only open question. History suggests it’s harder than it looks. But they’re clearly not going to stop trying.