(de-news.net) – Bavaria has joined Andreas Voßkuhle, the former president of the Federal Constitutional Court, in advocating the introduction of legislation that would obligate internet users to disclose their actual identities. This development situates Bavaria within a broader national conversation about the limits of anonymity in digital communication and the responsibilities of democratic institutions in mitigating online harms. According to media reports, Bavarian Digital Minister Fabian Mehring (Free Voters) argued that such a requirement could help civilize discourse on social media by ensuring that individuals remain accountable for their statements across both analog and digital environments. By anchoring speech in identifiable authorship, he suggested, public communication might regain a level of civility currently undermined by the permissiveness that anonymity affords.
Mehring insisted that individuals who engage in insults, threats, or forms of incitement must be identifiable online and that acts deemed illegal in casual, face-to-face settings should be subject to comparable sanctions when they occur in virtual spaces. In his view, heightened accountability would foster a more conscientious form of participation, thereby reducing the toxicity that has come to characterize parts of digital debate. He underscored that the proposal was not intended to curtail legitimate expression but rather to reinforce a resilient rule-of-law framework capable of functioning in a digital environment where hate speech and agitation should not be shielded by anonymity. The underlying aim, he maintained, was to create conditions in which democratic norms and legal standards could be meaningfully upheld online.
Similarly, Berlin Justice Senator Felor Badenberg (CDU) has called for an open yet purposeful nationwide discussion on potential real-name obligations. Her intervention reflects growing concern among policymakers that existing regulatory instruments have become insufficient to address the qualitative and quantitative escalation of abusive online behavior. Badenberg observed that insults, threats, and targeted personal attacks—once considered marginal phenomena—have increasingly permeated mainstream digital communication. The erosion of social inhibitions under conditions of anonymity, she warned, has reshaped the tone and texture of online discourse in ways that threaten the health of democratic deliberation. If unchecked, she cautioned, this trend risks normalizing hate-motivated offenses, thereby undermining social cohesion, diminishing empathy, and weakening the collective willingness to engage in open, good-faith dialogue.
Because the sheer volume of problematic content often prevents legal norms from being consistently enforced, she argued that many users have come to perceive the digital sphere as governed by a fundamentally different rule set than the offline world. In practice, this perception permits potentially criminal statements to be made without restraint or fear of consequences. To counter this development, she maintained that the state must be empowered to fulfill its protective function—especially with regard to children and adolescents—by equipping investigative authorities with reliable mechanisms for swiftly identifying suspects. Furthermore, she argued that platforms must be assigned greater responsibility for contributing to the enforcement of legal standards, given their central role in structuring online interactions.
Voßkuhle had previously endorsed the same proposal, contending that a real-name requirement was necessary to rationalize online communication and restore a more stable form of public discourse. He maintained that society could not indefinitely tolerate the ongoing coarsening of speech in digital arenas and that a clearer connection between statements and their authors could help purify the quality of debate. Although he acknowledged that such reform would be legally and administratively complex, he considered it constitutionally permissible provided it rested on a precise and proportionate justification. At the same time, he emphasized that citizens must retain the ability to criticize the government without fearing personal repercussions, a principle he regarded as essential to democratic oversight.
As director of the University of Freiburg’s Institute for Political Science and Legal Philosophy, Voßkuhle linked his position to what he described as a paradoxical public environment: although citizens increasingly seek political orientation, each individual political statement is simultaneously amplified by digital platforms and the media to the point of being portrayed as a potential state crisis. This feedback loop, he argued, produces a climate of chronic agitation and societal disorientation that weakens democratic resilience. Alongside his academic work and his leadership of the organization “Gegen Vergessen – für Demokratie,” Voßkuhle’s institutional experience—as a member of the Federal Constitutional Court from 2008 to 2020 and its president from 2010 onward—has informed his assessment that the digital public sphere requires new regulatory instruments to prevent further deterioration of political culture.
