In a column reeking of them-darned-kids-and-their-darned-Internet antiquarianism, The Guardian’s Jonathan Myerson dubs anonymity a force of “debase[d] debate”:
Far from being a crucial brick in the wall of free speech, online anonymity debases debate and devalues the national dialogue
Jan Chip Chase’s thought-provoking quote below, CV Dazzle, and the German Pirate Party all prompt me to ask one question:
Should we pursue anonymity as a right, or anonymity as a market solution?
Surely there are people willing to pay for privacy, even total anonymity online. And maybe if companies see a valuable market in providing anonymity — we’ll keep you secret if you pay for it — then there might be more initiatives dedicated to doing so.
This makes me exceedingly uncomfortable. I don’t want anonymity to be a luxury for the rich or the technologically savvy.
Although Professor Orlando Figes used anonymity to publish caustic reviews of his peers online, anonymity and the right to sue for libel must be protected, writes Katie Engelhart.
[Note: this post originally appeared on www.freespeechdebate.com, a project of Oxford University.]
In April 2010, a mysterious commenter, writing under the nom de plume “Historian”, began publishing caustic reviews of newly released books about Soviet history on the Amazon.co.uk website. “Historian” deemed Professor Rachel Polonsky’s work to be “dense” and “pretentious” and Professor Robert Service’s latest tome to be “rubbish”, “an awful book”. At the same time, the commenter hailed the “beautiful and necessary” work of Birbeck College Professor Orlando Figes. In private emails, circulated amongst prominent specialists in the field (including Figes), a suspicion was aired: that “Historian” was none other than Figes himself. In one of those emails, Service dubbed the reviews “unpleasant personal attacks in the old Soviet fashion”.
And so began the academy-rattling saga. Figes categorically denied the implied allegations against him and accused his rivals of libel. Soon, he instructed his lawyer to threaten legal action against Polonsky, Service and several publications that had published the historians’ conjectures. But no sooner were the legal threats unveiled than Figes’s wife, the barrister Stephanie Palmer, admitted to publishing the reviews herself. An apparently aghast Figes issued a statement indicating that he had “only just found out about this”.
But this explanation too proved short-lived. On 23 April 2010, Figes released a new statement assuming “full responsibility” for the posts and apologising to those he had accused. He later agreed to pay damages to, and cover the legal costs incurred by, Polonsky and Service.
This morning, I saw a tiny, reddish beetle on my windowsill, right next to my bed. My first groggy-eyed thought was: Oh hello, Nature. How are you? Thanks for bringing me a cute little friend!
And then I remembered that this is NEW YORK CITY, which means that any and all small reddish moving dots I see must be under immediate suspicion of being BEDBUGS. And bedbugs – bedbugs!!! – mean that I will have to make embarrassing phone calls to prospective weekend houseguests, suffer nightmares about teeming infestations, and rack up massive drycleaning bills. In between bouts of hyperventilation, I captured the beetle in a Ziplock bag, snapped a dozen photos of it, and started up Google Image Search to see if in fact this intruder was the harbinger of gross news. (It wasn’t.)
As with many of my Googlings, I fell down the rabbit hole of tangential but compelling side searches. Could bedbugs lay eggs in your eyeballs or ears? (Unclear.) Can other insects do so? (Yes.) What does one do if one suspects an earwig or a cockroach has invaded one’s ear? (STOP ASKING QUESTIONS ONLINE AND GO TO THE DOCTOR.) That latter line of questioning fascinated me: folks online were incredibly candid about asking questions that one might not otherwise ask a neighbor, friend, or casual passerby. Nor would one share with polite company the various implements used in coaxing a cockroach or other insect out of one’s orifices (Castor oil, in case you’re wondering). Even I had turned to Google with my entomological crisis before I called my friends — – even those that I knew had faced off with these skin-munching critters before. I was so afraid of confronting any latent stigma associated with bedbugs that an online search seemed preferable.
John Suler calls this phenomenon dissociative anonymity: the idea that you can operate in a space without any affiliation with your real name. Not only does this allow you a sense of safety – that is, the ability to ask questions freely without any fear of stigma from others – but it also allows you to convince yourself that the phenomena you discuss or search online does not really relate to you. Dissociative anonymity cuts two ways. The first is what Suler calls benign disinhibition. Benign disinhibition explains why you feel okay workshopping your Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan fiction ideas on a message board, or sharing your deepest wishes and fears in a comment thread. Benign disinhibition explains why many loosen up online much more than they do in face-to-face interactions. Suler explains that this type of disinhibition “indicates an attempt to understand and explore oneself, to work through problems and find new ways of being.”
And then there’s toxic disinhibition, also known as The Reason That YouTube Comments Make Me Disappointed in Humanity. Toxic disinhibition, as Suler sums it up, explains why hateful, harsh, and grotesque commentary so frequently emerges in anonymous or pseudonymous spaces.
De-linking one’s identity from one’s behavior certainly lets people experiment – but that experimentation isn’t always pretty. I’m honestly not sure if online anonymity encourages more benign or toxic disinhibition, though I do understand that many calls for banning anonymity online are premised on an understanding that the repercussions from toxic disinhibition ruin the sandbox for everyone. What I am sure of, however, is that removing the possibility of dissociative anonymity troubles me. For me, that is one beauty of the Internet: the ability to play and to experiment, to question and to ask, to learn without shame. Dissociative anonymity seems to be the engine behind at least some of that – and modes of linking fixed identity and behavior online would threaten that anonymity.
Of course, one could argue that the world was an exceptionally playful, experimental, question-friendly space well before there was cyberspace-enabled dissociative anonymity. That is true. But the online space is becoming eminently more trackable — that is, it’s easy for cookies or talented folks or even untalented folks to figure out exactly where you’ve been and what you’ve been up to online — and permanently traceable. The space in which you play, experiment, and ask questions can now be preserved indefinitely, and often out of your control.
To me, this strengthens the case for dissociative anonymity alive in the online space – and not just the perception of it, but actual anonymity – for that reason. But is there a way to keep toxic disinhibition — the type that goes beyond disappointing comments and into actual harrassment — from growing alongside?
Anonymity = cowardice? = half-way to heroism?
Former Israeli soldiers disclose routine mistreatment of Palestinian children. (via The Guardian). “Most of the soldiers have given testimonies anonymously.”
FromThe New York Times:
South Korean Court Rejects Online Name Verification Law
“SEOUL, South Korea — In a major victory for free speech activists in South Korea, a top court on Thursday ruled unconstitutional a law that required Internet users to verify their identity before posting comments on major local Web sites. […]
The regulation was adopted amid widespread concern that Internet users were deluging Web sites with malicious and defamatory comments and false rumors; in a few cases, such statements were blamed in the suicides of celebrities.
But free-speech advocates condemned the rule, arguing that the government was using perceived abuses as a convenient excuse to discourage political criticism. They feared that people would censor themselves rather than provide their names, which would make it easier for the government to find and possibly punish them.”
Some points to note here:
Unlike the real-name debate in Germany (see below), the South Korean discussion was focused narrowly on libel. German officials worry about criminals using anonymity to shield their nefarious criminal activities. In South Korea, the primary target of the proposed real-name policy seems to have been the ordinary web user who hides behind anonymity to launch slanderous verbal attacks.
Also interesting is the strategy taken by the opponents: the free speech activists. Their main grievance here was not that government was censoring web users - but rather that government policies would encourage self-censorship.
The issue of self-censorship is also on the table in Myanmar, where the regime just ended direct media censorship.
If Germany’s especially-litigious Pirate Party has its way, the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) will soon be forced to rule on whether anonymity is a human right - or, more specifically, part of the right to private life enshrined under the European Convention on Human Rights.
Reuters reports:
“This latest suit follows a February ruling by Germany’s Federal Constitutional Court that it was constitutional for telecommunication providers to demand personal data to set up accounts.
Some European Union countries such as Germany, Denmark, and France, have outlawed anonymous pre-paid cards to prevent their use in criminal activities, but the Pirate Party says that stifles a citizen’s right to privacy and free speech.”
As Polonsky eloquently explained in July 2010, “our cause of action was not the pseudonymous Amazon reviews themselves. Our objectives in pressing this case were to recover the considerable costs we had incurred in fending off Professor Figes’s legal threats…” This is an important distinction. Though his actions were cowardly, petty and unbefitting his distinguished academic title, Orlando Figes had the right to publish reviews of his peers: anonymously or otherwise.
But what of the legal brouhaha that followed? Polonsky and Service both criticised Figes’s hasty resort to legal means: his menacing legal notices and charges of libel. Indeed, Figes’s attempt to turn the law against his rivals appears absurd—but only because he was lying all along.
Our ninth draft principle specifies: “We should be able to counter slurs on our reputations without stifling legitimate debate.” If Figes had been telling the truth—if he was not, in fact, the pseudonymous reviewer—we might be sympathetic to his desperate efforts to protect his professional reputation. It does feel somewhat tragic when academic debate turns litigious. But the right to sue for libel, in appropriate circumstances, must be protected. Figes abused this protection; but this does not, as Service has suggested, mean that the protection is itself unjust.
In fact, Service’s post-debacle commentary is itself troubling. Service has lashed out at the “electronic media that enable the ink to flow from poison pens”. The Guardian reported that, in a private email to peers, Service noted: “Gorbachev banned [anonymity] from being used in the USSR as a way of tearing up someone’s reputation. Now the grubby practice has sprouted up here.”
I hardly think using technological or Gorbachev-style government measures to quash anonymous discussion is appropriate. Service surely understands that anonymous criticism has, in history, had its rightful place.