First off: OP of course can do what they want with their screenshots. And I understand if the poster is in fact someone OP knows and not wanting to so easily lead people back to their own twitter presence. But let’s not censor ourselves needlessly based off fears that have no basis in reality.

However, it’s a pretty white area. There is no meaningful legal liability from reposting publicly available, consensually posted content that has no copyright and iron-clad fair-use arguments for the purpose of comment, parody, educational use, etc. Effectively zero risk anywhere in the west to screenshot and comment on something posted publicly online (outside of stuff that breaks national security laws, grave intellectual property violations (think posting the coco-cola secret recipe level stuff), and child sexual abuse imagery) as it’s widely understood posting online in public is doing so in an open forum and inviting this kind of response. It’s only if the commenting, opinions, sentiment, speech itself violates the law that you have a problem and then it has nothing to do with not censoring or anonymizing names.

Once you’ve accepted the risk of non-pre-screened user-submitted content such as pictures, text, you’re already putting yourself in as hot of water as you end up in by allowing usernames to be present. I mean lots of reddit subs and other places used to straight up drop doxx posts on people connecting their online identities together and back to their real life ones, I saw a few on cth back in the day about prolific annoyances and I never heard of anyone dragged into court over that.

The key to avoiding liability is timely good faith removal of potentially infringing content upon receiving a valid legal request. It’s only persistent, flagrant, heavily repeated, demonstrably willful violations over long periods of time that have in the past successfully created liability. The biggest examples of successful online lawsuits I can think of include the gawker one which had to do with spreading revenge porn essentially and continually harassing a guy and not backing down when asked. There were numerous off-ramps that if gawker had backed down earlier they would have survived even a high-powered lawsuit like that. You really cannot get got for this stuff without being warned and ignoring the warnings.

I mean half of social media is reposting content you don’t own from others. We live in a society where random jerks with a camera can go around in public, get up in people’s faces with a camera, insult them, antagonize them, harass the shit out of them for views and clicks and there’s little that can be done with someone doing that for antagonism under the guise of “social experiment” while harassing and plastering someone’s face and name all over. I mean if this were a legal issue the web would look a lot different.

Now, you can get in hot water if people on your website organize harassment and break laws to do so but that has nothing to do with showing usernames and importantly pretty much has to be a continued pattern of harassment and inaction after repeated notice. If people are saying “PM me for their info” and you’re allowing it as people talk about harassment, bomb threats, whatever, then you could be in trouble censored names or no. But just showing something someone else voluntarily posted to a public space online? Nah. And we don’t I think have a problem with users here harassing people to my knowledge even in an internet bullying way (correct me if I’m wrong of course). So the solution is not allowing a culture where people accept that, fostering one where people cry fed-posting and report such things before they can go anywhere and be used as evidence of anything.

I’d be far more worried about the potential for all the “in minecraft” comments that I sometimes see than anything near this. Like the Palestinian situation has people heated and I’ve seen some stuff that really makes me worry for the person posting it because of the heat they could bring on themselves.

Now if the people in the screenshots were breaking laws or in danger from the security state by spreading around what they’d been exposing or saying, or if their words could be construed as slander, there’s an argument there. It doesn’t apply here but there is one. That said, doing that won’t protect most people who break serious laws, they need good opsec in the first place.