<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/31/style/anonymity-pseudonymity-online-identity.html>
In early July, when England’s soccer team lost the European Championship final
to Italy on its home turf, the crushing defeat was followed by a torrent of
racist abuse on social media directed at the team’s Black players. The messages
— part of an ongoing pattern of social media bigotry — were condemned by
politicians, platforms, teammates and fans.
They were also blamed, in part, on a familiar figure: the masked troll. He’s
been popping up a lot lately. Depending who you are, he may be the source of
all political disinformation; one of an army of bots; the leader of an online
mob; a hacker or a scammer. He has a mascot — the guy in a hoodie at his
keyboard, face obscured in the shadows, except for a little smirk. In the
popular imagination, this figure, operating under a name concealed or chosen,
is almost always up to no good.
That could explain why people so often push for unmasking him. In England, this
episode renewed calls for tech companies to enforce identity verification for
their users. A petition of the British government demanding that it make
“verified ID a requirement for opening a social media account” has more than
688,000 signatures. “We have rights to free speech and association, but as real
people, not fake people,” wrote Paul Mason, a columnist for The New Statesman.
One optimistic assumption behind these ideas is that racism is so stigmatized,
people wouldn’t dare espouse such things under their own names (a curious read
of politics, British or otherwise, circa 2021). It implies that to adopt a new
identity is to become “fake.”
But it is also pretty close to how things already work. After a decade in which
online identity came under increasingly centralized control, in which various
digital and offline identities were mingled, and during which personal data
became a hot global commodity, control over one’s identity is starting to look
more like a threatened privilege than a right. To exist online is to be
constantly asked to show yourself.
Whose Space Is This?
Online anonymity and pseudonymity have survived accusations of ruining the
internet for as long as people have been logging on; they have been abused by
bad actors. They’re also widely misunderstood.
A lot of common assumptions about anonymity are complicated by the literature
on how people actually behave online, as noted by researcher K. Nathan Matias.
In studies, for example, anonymous actors tend to be more, not less, sensitive
to group norms. More than half of victims of online harassment already know
their harassers. While there is scant evidence that “real name” policies
mitigate abuse, there is plenty suggesting that asking people to expose more
private information can intensify it. Researchers have found that, in some
contexts, the most aggressive commenters have been observed to be more likely
to reveal their identities.
An analysis of nearly two decades of British press by Thais Sardá, a researcher
at Loughborough University, however, found that coverage of anonymous spaces,
often and imprecisely called the “dark web,” was “underpinned by a sharply
negative characterization” of anonymity. When represented at all, positive uses
of anonymity and pseudonymity are portrayed as narrow and exceptional; it makes
sense for dissidents, for instance, but what does everyone else have to hide?
[...]
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