Friday, December 15, 2017
What Anonymity Does and Doesn't Do
Anonymity is not the reason online trolls can achieve success. They are enabled by the physical disconnect between them and their targets. When people harassed Lindy West on Twitter, many of those people use their real names as their Twitter handle. They can choose to give up anonymity, and will receive the same shielding from social consequences because they are not physically talking to anyone. The only way to stop the trolling is to censor out the bad stuff. The First Amendment only protects speech from government action, and it only applies in the United States. Twitter sets its own terms of use for its platform and has the option to allow or disallow whatever they want. Whether it is right or wrong for Twitter to police speech on its platform is another debate, but the point I am trying to make is that the fact that people are anonymous on the internet does not cause online trolling and harassment and that forcing people to use their real names to “remove anonymity” is not an effective solution.
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Jacob, I agree with your point about real names not removing anonymity. To go further on this point, even posting what a person's credentials are isn't a foolproof system. Even with checks on these, those with the right knowledge can still manage a way to get in. It really comes down to how badly these people want their voices heard. The social media websites are tasked with preventing that hurtful speech, but there's no way to easily be completely rid of it.
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