I agree with you on the point that free speech (and free societies in general I think) require a culture of good faith participation. You only get nice things when everyone is more or less civil.

The problem is making the tough choices of what to do about uncivil discourse or bad faith actors who are not interested in upholding civility for the sake of the society. Unfortunately there are no easy answers which leave us with a lot of bad or difficult options to choose from.

Discussion tends to be more civil when participants can’t be anonymous.

Then an entire class of trolling stops becoming scalable.

Very true, IMO one of the reasons why the internet is so toxic is because humans aren't actually interacting directly with each other - we just fire off our thoughts into the ether from behind our screens.

I'd think we're not utilizing all of our social faculties we otherwise would in a face-to-face conversation. We don't see a human in front of us so our brains aren't "firing on all cylinders". E.g. being polite, assuming good-faith, tempering negative impulses and all of the other social lubricant that normally allows humans to peacefully coexist in a society.

I never thought of the disconnect, but that certainly explains why some are so prone to troll and exhibit sociopath-like tendencies online.

The concept of "good faith" is a self-refuting one, as it has no real definition. It's just an sophisticated sounding ad-hominem that means "I don't think this person really believes what they say" but is invariably made without any proof, as it's the sort of unfalsifiable she's-a-witch claim that cannot be proven one way or another.

As long as the ruling class thinks your speech is responsible, then speak away!