Anonymity: Expectation or Right?

Somewhat recently, a public official was linked to remarks he allegedly posted online while using a pseudonym. The official had done nothing illegal, but his reputation suffered greatly after being linked to the remarks. That got me thinking about people's expectations of being able to express themselves anonymously online.

Let's assume, for the moment, that the official in question really did post remarks that, once linked to him, resulted in public disgrace. Anyone posting online using a pseudonym or posting anonymously likely has some expectation that his or her remarks won't be linked to his/her "real world," offline identity. At the very least, having remarks you made anonymously or pseudonymously is a violation of your expectations. I'd expect it to feel as though your privacy had being violated; anonymity gives you a kind of privacy. In fact, that's how I originally processed the story of the official: as a case in which an individual's privacy was violated. People generally regard privacy (however fuzzily defined) as a right (though people also have a way of justifying such violations if they feel that the uncovered sin is great enough).

On further reflection, I'm not so sure linking someone to comments they made anonymously is analogous to other violations of privacy (i.e., someone installing a camera in your bathroom). Perhaps we've come to conflate anonymity with privacy. When I say things to a friend in a private setting, I expect those things not to be recorded and played back in some other context. This kind of privacy of self-expression in a particular limited context (i.e., secrets) has been a part of many societies for a long time (though I'd stop short of calling it natural and/or a basic human right). But the ability to express one's self to a large number of people anonymously hasn't been around for more than a decade or so. Of course, there have been anonymous sources for a long time, and the protection of witnesses through the assignment of new identities has been a common protocol for a long time. But in terms of the frequency and ease with which the average person can express themselves anonymously on an everyday basis, I think it's a relatively new phenomenon. Additionally, things said in private and things said anonymously differ radically in terms of their impact. Whispering secrets among a small group of friends likely has one impact on the attitudes and beliefs of others while writing something anonymously online likely has another (typically larger) impact.

I can understand a society that wants to enshrine the first kind of privacy (whispering in private, off the record) as a basic right, but to lump anonymous self-expression (a relatively recent widespread phenomenon) in with this strikes me as rash. Certainly, many of us have come to take for granted the ability to say things anonymously that will not be associated with our "real world" identities, and it feels bad when our expectations are violated, and but that doesn't make it a right.

When considering whether or not something should be treated as a right, we tend to look backward, for precedent. I wonder about the limits of this approach. It demands that we make forced analogies that don't really fit. We select the analogy to the past that suits us ("posting anonymously is like publishing controversial political tracts under an assumed name," or, if you're on the other side, "posting anonymously is like the hoods that members of the Ku Klux Klan wore"). Instead, it seems to me to be worthwhile to consider the aggregate effects on society, now and for the foreseeable future, of enshrining something as a right. Would a world in which we had to live in fear of being associated with everything we say and do anonymously online be a better or worse world?

Reasons why anonymity is good: it makes it easier for folks who are seeking help for a stigmatized condition to receive help. It facilitates "whistle-blowing" and ensures confidentiality of sources, making it easier to hold powerful institutions accountable. Anonymity is also a kind of bulwark against surveillance and the permanence of online memory and the ease with which messages are taken out of context, widely disseminated, framed in misleading ways, and used against the speaker. This last one seems like a biggie. The tactic of using one's past words against one's future self was once a technique used by the press on politicians, but now it seems to be used by anyone on anyone. And so we cling to anonymous self-expression as a way to retain some freedom of speech.

Reasons why anonymity is bad: it permits hostility without consequences, on a massive scale and, thus, normalizes hostile thinking and behavior. Hostile people aren't as isolated as they were before; they can easily find one another and, together, justify their hostility as a defense of their rights, freedom, or as an act of justice.

So, if we lose trust in the ability of any communication tool to provide us with true anonymity (as would likely happen if a few more high-profile un-maskings were to occur), we're probably going to lose some good things and some bad things. Any attempt to determine whether anonymity should be defended as a right should consider the weight of those things. I think that gets lost in debates about the merits of, well, a lot of things these days. It isn't enough to link a particular course of action to bad consequences. You must consider all of the consequences as well as all of the consequences of the other plausible courses of action, to the extent that such things are possible, before arriving at a decision.

It could be that younger people who've grown up with the ability to express themselves anonymously may simply dislike the prospect of losing this ability so much that it may not matter whether we officially enshrine anonymous speech as part and parcel of the right to privacy. The demand for it might be so high that economically and politically (rather than ethically), it will be treated as a necessity. Conversely, the decay of true anonymity (and the fear of being "outed") may be an inevitable consequence of a highly networked world in which sufficiently motivated people can unmasked whomever they want, regardless of how badly the majority of folks wish that anonymity were a protect right.

Are Online Communities Sustainable? (or online relationships, for that matter)

Reading an interesting post by Trent Reznor regarding his departure from social media (in particular Twitter, but also his extensive participation in online fora w/ fans). He charts his progress from idealist (hoping that he could make the relationship between artist and fan more intimate and unmediated, no PR people, etc) to cynic. His major problems with social media are trolls and anonymity. Essentially, its the classic problem of anonymity leading to more purposefully disruptive hate speech. Reznor offer a little dimestore psychology based on his discovery of who was behind the trolling. It is more or less consistent with the findings of Mattathias Schwartz in his NYTimes article on trolling: people who troll are looking for a way to get back at the world for hurting them, marginalizing them, or rendering them powerless, and anonymous internet fora provide them with the easiest way to do this.

Reznor's relationship with fans is unlike most social media users' experiences. There's a significant real-world power imbalance between star and fan, one that attracts trolling. Trolling doesn't happen everywhere or in random places; usually, its only highly-trafficked places or in communities that someone has something against. Reznor notes how moderators can use filters to reduce the effects of trolls (and places like Digg and Youtube do good jobs of getting rid of spam and trolls by using collective downvoting to obscure them and render them ineffective) but its still trouble to do this and if the benefits don't outweigh the trouble, then you stop doing it.

Social media as a whole seems sustainable to me. People really want the ability to connect with others who share some of the same values, preference, or beliefs, some who may not be available in the real-world social networks they inhabit. But individual online social networks or applications like Twitter and various message boards seem precarious. Some of their appeal might be in their novelty. Another problem might be the "tipping point" effect when several key members decide to leave or have some real-world commitment that draws them away. As with a real-life party, if a couple of key people leave, that tends to clear everyone else out, even if those people wouldn't have planned on leaving that soon in the first place. Its just group-think and there are no negative repercussions for bailing on an online social scene.

Its possible that online social scenes develop at a point when its members have some down-time, in transition periods in their real world lives. Its not that they're "losers" and can't make it in the real world social scenes (though that might still be the case for many). Its more that they have an appetite for sociability that is underserved at the time they join the social scene. So really, members have two things in common: whatever the raison d'etre of the scene is and the fact that they're all in some sort of transition period (which could include a period of identity questioning, hence popularity w/ teens). Anyway, these scenes don't last b/c the law of averages says that each person's real life will eventually interfere with their participation and the group will splinter.

But perhaps that depends on how much the group is really about the people in the group or whatever the group happens to be "about" (e.g. Nine Inch Nails, funny online videos, hunting, etc). I guess the latter are more informational exchanges or opportunities to share amusement over a subject while the former are something resembling (and perhaps standing in for) real world social scenes. Real world social scenes break up, too. People move away, get jobs, have kids, get divorced, etc. But I still suspect that b/c they are joined during times of real world social transition and there's no negative repercussions to leaving, online social scenes are more apt to disintegrate (or at least cycle through members) than real world social scenes. Really, they haven't been around long enough to say one way or the other.

Levels of online discourse on message boards

After perusing two comments sections that relate to the Virginia Tech massacre - one section under the killer's video on YouTube and the other under a column written by a Dartmouth student on the NYTimes page - I've come to the conclusion that there are many different levels of discourse online. At first, it appears as though there is only one - the shrill, profanity-laden dialog you see on high-profile, heavily trafficked sites like YouTube. There's lots of talk of the disinhibiting effect of anonymity, and how it will result, inevitably, in mean-spirited discourse. But its likely that the majority of online discourse takes place "below the surface" of this level of discourse, involving groups of people with similar values who are less likely to flame one another.

The more "public" the discussion is (that is, the more hits that website gets), the more likely the discussion is to be about pecking order. The more "private" it is, the more the discussion will be about sharing information. To say that online discourse is uniformly public just because it can all be accessed by anyone misses the point of how we actually use these spaces to interact with others. We use them according to our particular tastes and desires, which are largely pre-determined by our real-world circumstances (our upbringing, what neighborhood we're living in, our profession). The way sites are linked together continues this trend of linking like-minded people to one another, resulting in smaller, less angry conversations. YouTube is a place for looking at what everyone is looking at. Blogs (where smaller groups of people congregate with like-minded folks) are the place to discuss them.

Then there's the matter of moderation (the NYTimes blog comments board makes more of a point of letting people know that its being moderated than the YouTube one). Presumably, the smaller the site, the less moderation would be needed. But that wholes process (what gets cut, why it gets cut, how many comments get cut) is never really clear. Not that we seem to mind.