Online anonymity

Online anonymity is a phenomenon encouraged by the technological orientation of the Internet, although people take an active role in attempting online anonymity with little tech savvy as well. Anonymity, at its core, means the separation of one’s activities from identifying features such as legal name, location, birth date, and family information. Internet users may employ a range of strategies to achieve anonymity, from using a dummy e-mail address or a fictional social media profile to using proxy servers. There are also various levels of anonymity, ranging from full identification to pseudonym usage, in which a person adopts a name that cannot be linked to their legal identity, to full anonymity.

Background

In 1996, John Perry Barlow typed out the Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace in a frenzy of utopian sentiment. In it, he described how the anonymity of the Internet permitted a new egalitarianism to emerge beyond the boundaries of race, creed, ethnicity, nationality, gender, and sexual orientation. He thought that people’s contributions would be valued solely on merit. He also predicted the erosion of government power.

However, the anonymity possible in the online world has in reality caused considerable controversy and led to challenges both for individual users and for larger social and political concerns. The masking of identities behind digital avatars or pseudonymous usernames means that users must be aware that others may not be who or what they appear to be. Anonymity leaves many channels open to fraud and other online crimes, the rates of which increased substantially throughout the early twenty-first century. Additionally, the rise of social media in particular was accompanied by instances of bullying and racism enabled by anonymity and the lack of repercussions, as seen in the phenomenon of "trolling," in which users post intentionally offensive, instigating, or irrational messages within an online community in order to generate arguments.

Specific examples of the impact of online anonymity—including instances where assumed anonymity is revealed to be compromised—have often attracted considerable media interest and public controversy. In 2007, a popular World of Warcraft fan video outed characters in the game as “gold farmers,” professional players who make real money from selling virtual goods. Not only did this video out the previously anonymous players, it targeted them with a vitriolic racist discourse because many of them were Chinese. In an even more obviously sociopolitical example, it was revealed that the US National Security Agency (NSA) had access to the online communications of millions of US citizens, as well as to domestic and foreign telephone metadata, sparking concerns that most online activity could in fact be traced back to its source, potentially violating individuals' privacy.

Some contend that the norm on the Internet is anonymity. Others, however, note that most online business and social media require some sort of identity verification. Anonymity is an orientation of the technological features of the Internet; one has to have a fairly high level of expertise to link an IP address with other identifiers such as name and location. However, the values encoded in one layer of the Internet are not necessarily found in others. Thus, though relative anonymity is a feature of the infrastructural layer with regards to transmission protocols, this does not mean it necessarily figures largely in the control software and applications layer. Facebook, for example, strongly discourages anonymity. Arguments against anonymity include the tendency for people to vent socially unacceptable feelings and actions to escape responsibility. A quick visit to the comment sections of news articles is often unpleasant enough to give weight to this argument.

Overview

A study of a news website that transitioned from a comment platform that allowed anonymity to one that did not showed that identified users tended to have their comments liked by others more than anonymous users. Anonymous users tended to use profanity and angry language more often than identified users. The researchers noted that computer-mediated communication in general tends to encourage deindividuation, which means that people are less aware of how their actions are socially situated, which results in less concern about what others think and do.

To be fair, the Internet has resulted in greater political transparency with the emergence and continued activities of groups such as WikiLeaks, which publicizes leaked documents online that expose various wrongdoings of governments and government agencies. WikiLeaks depends upon protecting its suppliers’ anonymity, and it does this technologically with an online, electronic drop-box that has so far proved difficult to trace. The flow of information between those who hold political power and the governed has traditionally been tilted in the former’s favor; therefore WikiLeaks needs to protect their informants from prosecution. They also need reliable data storage, which they have found in an underground nuclear bunker. Their organizational headquarters is in Sweden, where the act of revealing journalists’ sources is a criminal offence. With regards to transmission security, WikiLeaks has had to bolster their encryption and has adopted “onion routing,” which scrambles the encoded locations of the sources, destinations, and dates in their Internet traffic. To do this they use the Tor network. However, information weapons of the QUANTUM program have been used by the NSA to reveal the identities and locations of members of this network.

Aside from WikiLeaks and other “hacktivist” groups such as Anonymous, ordinary people also feel the need to secure some degree of anonymity in their online activities. The reasons for this include fear of judgment from family and friends; fear of discovery by an abusive ex-partner, family member, or any other person an individual has reason to believe would cause them harm if their true identity were revealed; self-protection from prosecution in the case of activities such as illegal downloading; solicitation of honest, uncoerced input and critique of creative works; entertainment and/or practical jokes; and fear of political, social, or workplace persecution. In one study, researchers found that while some people used anonymity to conceal some wrongdoings, they used it just as often to help or support another with no enduring commitments. Contrary to the saying that “honest people should have nothing to hide,” many people seek anonymity because of prior negative experiences.

It should be noted, however, that anonymity is rarely absolute. Even on sites such as 4chan.org, which is credited with originating such popular online memes as LOLcats and where anonymity is assumed as the norm, it is possible to recognize patterns of form and content in the writing, images, and links shared on the site. This is true despite the site culture that sometimes even scorns contributors who use “tripcodes” or pseudonyms. Furthermore, a person would have to be a top-notch hacker in order to evade the identification techniques of a powerful organization such as the NSA.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) describes "the right to remain anonymous" as "a fundamental component of our right to free speech," which it extends to online anonymity as well. The organization has taken on a number of cases against government and corporate efforts to identify anonymous critics and political dissidents online. In one such case, Sarkar v. Doe, the ACLU represented PubPeer, a website designed to enable anonymous peer review of scientific research without fear of reprisal; in December 2016 the Michigan Court of Appeals upheld a previous judge's ruling that the site cannot be compelled to unmask an anonymous user for making critical comments based on publicly available data, because such comments do not constitute defamation, as the plaintiff in the case had claimed. In another case, the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) sent a summons to the social media platform Twitter demanding it reveal records regarding the account @ALT‗USCIS, which had been critical of the Donald Trump administration, with a focus on US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), a department under the DHS. In response, Twitter sued the federal government to block the unmasking, citing the First Amendment right to free speech, and the ACLU assigned lawyers to represent the anonymous user and announced their intent to file on the user's behalf. The DHS immediately withdrew the summons, and in response Twitter voluntarily dismissed its lawsuit. In addition to defending anonymous users against "overbroad or unjustified efforts to unmask" them, the ACLU also "monitor[s] occasional efforts to establish verified online identities" to ensure that any such efforts do not infringe on the right to anonymous speech online.

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