Anonymity's Influence on Internet Behavior

-- By IndraDan - 11 Oct 2023

Introduction

Trolling. Hate speech. Bad faith arguments. Emotional volatility.

Negativity festers on social media platforms. This warped content is far more plentiful and hostile on the internet than in the daily lives of most of the platform’s users. More vulgar and more cutting, more purposeful (in terms of riling up its readers) and more pointless (in terms of impact off the internet).

This reality seems to imply that it is the platforms themselves that cultivate this ferocious content that exists almost nowhere else in human society. Evaluation of how these platforms organize themselves and what incentives are developed illustrate this issue. Due to the prioritization of engagement and clicks, distorted content that is more likely to push “buttons” and incite reaction are preferable. The short-form of these posts does violence to nuanced analysis. Instead, authors (and their readers) are encouraged to avoid entertaining alternative perspectives. The echo chambers that are produced from this communication style exist in every substantive realm, from sports media to politics, far-left and far-right alike.

While the inquiry into platforms' influence over human interaction on the internet provides convincing explanations for the rise of this negativity, the human contribution must also be evaluated. The darkness that these networks pull out is human.

Anonymity and Accountability

Anonymity has a tremendous role in this discussion. Internet anonymity grants humans a world without repercussions. One’s spiteful comments on the internet often do not come with the corresponding threat of physical consequences. Further, the provocateur on the internet is insulated from admonishment - they never see how their comments actually affect their targets. Instead, social media communication substitutes real human responses with the provocateur’s fantasies. The idea of shaming, hurting or just refuting the other party fills an emotional itch for these people. If the fantasy of how others respond to the comment is appealing enough, the network is filled with the human negativity that follows, and the provocateur gets a viral tweet.

The absence of accountability seems to draw out these aspects of the human psyche. Anonymity blesses internet users with the ability to live in their fantasies. The real world holds people accountable by forcing them to face the real impact of their actions. It is in this way that many societal norms have evolved - people stop doing what others will reject them for. In turn, abrasive, offensive and malicious behavior is almost instinctively met with general disgust. By shielding provocateurs from this feedback loop, network platforms have taken away the human defense to this vulgarity - exposing internet users to the darkness. From anecdotal experience, users that embrace anonymity are propagators of much more negativity than those that are not.

Platforms user’s operate on a spectrum, with some users tying their “real lives” more tightly to their internet personas than others. Any given user’s behavior can be influenced dramatically based upon how strong the tie is. Noteworthy is that the real life connection creates an accountability for users of how other humans will perceive them. Where internet users feel they are connected to reality, their social inhibitions still persist on the internet. Where anonymity is stripped, human interaction over the internet begins to resemble that of real-world interaction.

This suggests that it may not be the actual platform’s organization that breeds the negativity as much as the mindset of the users themselves. For the anonymous users, their fearlessness is hollow. Qualifying their comments as “jokes”, there are few who are willing to attach their names and faces to the negativity produced on the internet. Anonymity empowers users to justify to themselves that their actions don’t reflect on their humanity. After all, no one thinks of themselves as evil.

A core element of social media’s success has been its ability to allow all users to play a character of themselves. Each user writes their own narrative, sharing with the world what they want and conveniently avoiding all other aspects of their realities (In this way, social media influencers are not much less anonymous than the average internet troll!). Social media users have no human accountability for the gaps in their online characters. Yet, social media culture continues to develop characters that are detached from their user’s realities. As a result, users are filled with a false sense of confidence that they are in “control” of what information they share with the world.

User’s are hyper-aware that they didn’t share the picture that breaks their fantasy. With the assurance that no one they know will see the picture, users fail to internalize just what they have shared with the platform. The ability to control what other humans perceive on the internet is the power that social media platforms provide their users. These platforms prey on the fact that their users generally only recognize accountability in contexts they are familiar with (i.e. how other humans will perceive their action). Most users in turn fail to acknowledge that these platforms are surveilling all of their behavior, from the picture they did not post to their subconscious behaviors. The exact things that would normally give rise to human’s instinctive shame are neatly collected and organized under the user’s social profile.

Conclusion

The irony is that social media’s anonymity is a facade that could come tumbling down at any point. Users unfamiliar with the way the platform absorbs their information believe that they are insulated, unaware of what they have already given up and willingly accepting the antisocial behavior that the platforms’ promote. The system of providing false anonymity has distorted how humans interact, and dramatically increased the amount of negativity that people experience in their daily lives.

While full-accountability on the internet would likely come with its own set of dystopian consequences, the impact that the current system has on human behavior illustrates an issue that must be addressed with change. It may be necessary for humans to recognize that their actions on the internet are not so remote from their real lives for the common man to champion privacy rights.

One way to improve this draft would be to give what is an opinion piece about social psychology some social psychology. The literature about anonymity and pseudonymity is hardly sparse, but you don't refer to any of it. Some of Sherry Turkle's Alone Together, which I have already assigned, would help, along with the literature she discusses. Even more important is her Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (1997), which is a masterpiece of knowledge and foresight.

Another route to improvement might be to consider more directly the politics of your inclinations. "Full accountability" might be "dystopian," but ... ?! If there are rights involved anywhere, you don't identify or discuss them. (This is odd, because even the US Supreme Court found its way in the course of the 20th century to the conclusion that a right to anonymity is inherent in the First Amendment's freedom of speech and of the press.) If there are no rights involved that would render mostly or completely irrelevant our attitudes about other people's behavior, it would be good to say why.

On the other side, there is the politics of behavior collection. If you consider profiling by entities in civil society not to be within their constitutional rights (to learn, to analyze, to publish), then it would be desirable to explain why they have no such rights or the ones they have are inapplicable. If they do have such rights, but they are subject to regulation anyway, it would be good to square that regulatory form and substance with the constitutional limits that exist. (I will be tackling all these questions in Computers, Privacy and the Constitution next term, but that certainly doesn't stop you from doing good thinking about them now.)

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