Six Reasons to Allow Anonymous Comments

By Ian, on March 23rd, 2010

While we slept and watched England #fail at sport over the weekend, our American colleagues were having a rousing discussion of the rights and wrongs of allowing people to comment anonymously on news sites, blogs and forums. Mathew Ingram writes up the story here. In typical internet style, the debate moved quickly from pros and cons to GOOD vs. EVIL…

The Case Against Anonymity

There definitely is one and I’d sum it up as follows:

The state of debate and personal courtesy on the Internet is fairly poor. On some very popular sites, it is awful.
People make hateful comments; bully others; they ‘troll’ discussion forums and worse.
This climate puts off people with milder opinions and manners, reinforcing the bad behaviour.
Others fight fire with fire, again escalating poor manners and the likelihood of a Godwin incident.
People would (mostly) not behave this way if they were (a) face-to-face with the people that they are debating; or (b) legally identifiable.
There are other reasons sometimes suggested such as child protection and reducing the incidence of other illegal activity (e.g. file-sharing forums).

I think these are fair points. But, on the other hand, I completely disagree with making it necessary for people to legally identify themselves, even to a site’s owner.

Why’s that then?

There’s six big reasons that I’d propose for allowing anonymity on your site. These are above and beyond the fact that making people register reduces the number of comments significantly:

Privacy is a right. Making my online dealings linked to the-real-me and potentially Google-able without my control is wrong. I worked as a teacher by day in the late eighties and nineties and in the evenings contributed regularly and anonymously to far-left politics and computer game forums. Neither my students nor my employees needed to know that. At that point in time, it could have quite seriously damaged my professional reputation and prospects. Yet it shouldn’t have: neither activity impinged upon the other. It still shouldn’t. You don’t live in a house with no curtains; why should anyone be made to do so online?

Protecting democracy. People have a right to disagree; to have critical, minority opinions that would make them unpopular with others. The majority is a terrible bully if your beliefs don’t accord with its own. It will make you feel bad, turns you down for jobs and refuses to serve you in its shops. Simply saying that people have a right to free speech without the mechanisms to allow that to happen, is not democracy. Anonymity is that mechanism.

Personal experience. Before social networks, we used things like IRC (it’s like a chat board) and NNTP (like a forum) to talk to people and discuss the topics we found interesting. The thing was, there was no way to force people to identify themselves if they didn’t want to, and hardly anyone did. Most people – myself included – kept persistent pseudonyms, to allow discussion to take place and comments to form part of our overall persona.

That ‘overall persona’ thing is important. Because they way you became more respected by the communities of which you were a member was wholly in the value of what you said or contributed. Not your job title or your academic qualifications. What you looked like, your age or sex, didn’t matter. If you gave value to the community by making astute comments, offering advice or posting resources for others, then your prestige rose organically. At the same time, it was voluntary. If you were simply trying out a group or maybe discussing something particularly sensitive, then you could choose a disposable nickname for the period of one or more sessions. You could tell the people who were respected because their postings and comments got lots of praise and responses, even from people who disagreed.

Was it some sort of lost Eden? No, of course it wasn’t. But you could block/ban/ignore people who were rude or deliberately provocative. People knew not to feed the trolls and how to erase most spam. And here’s the thing. On many of the newsgroups and channels I frequented, the level of debate was higher than I tend to see on any Facebook group page, 90% of Twitter and nearly all blogs.

So no, there isn’t any correlation between accredited identities and quality of debate. On Facebook, where nearly all identities are confirmed, there are just as many spammers, trolls and idiots as there are anywhere else. [Check out this blog post from Malcolm Coles for some especially horrible examples].

Whistleblowers and the Silenced. Many institutions – banks, the Health Service, the MoD, large corporations – do not want their people to say anything online. And they make them sign documents to legally prevent them from doing so. That’s not good news for democracy either. But fortunately, there’s anonymous web posting. Often, these people can make others aware of things happening thanks to their anonymity. More often, they can offer expert opinion and evidence in a debate. Most often, they simply get the chance to express themselves. People still get fired for this sort of thing.

Sick/Vulnerable People. Health forums where people can discuss their ailments and treatments. Bullying messageboards. People seeking advice about how to get out of debt. Job posting boards. All necessary and valuable. All require anonymity in order to operate properly.

The Young. When you’re young, you tend to do silly things like download copyrighted software and music. You tend to say things that will make you very embarrassed in ten years’ time. Your emotions tend to be a bit fiery and disproportionate. But that doesn’t matter on the Internet, because it was NiteHawk99 who did those things not Paul Smith, 99 Hadley Gardens, Croydon. Do we really want to stigmatise teenagers with all the things they do online for the rest of their lives? We don’t; but our technology and state of cultural development makes it too tempting to remember people’s actions forever.

The other, equally important, side of the ‘youth’ point is that the Internet allows for roleplay and the exploration of one’s personality without commitment. That’s important to emotional development. Teens often operate several personae online — the flirt, the parent, the fool, the poet, etc. That’s a really healthy, danger-free way to develop without too much trauma — if one of your personae crashes and burns, switch to a new one. Oh, but some people who ought to know better want to stop you doing that.

One Last Note

The comments and discussions are terrible on Have Your Say and various newspaper sites for three very simple reasons.

The technical structure of the boards and the transient nature of their populations means there’s very little in the way of prior reputation and often few ways to counter objectionable input.
There’s no editorial input whatsoever. Comments and discussion boards are viewed, it seems, as autonomous traffic-drivers which sit independently of the real content. No one ever responds with a factual correction or a rebuttal, let alone any encouragement.
There’s often very little exercise of the sites’ own codes of conduct. Moderation is nearly always reactive [report this], rather than pro-active. Since site owners won’t employ people to watch and engage with discussions, pointing out transgressions and (yes) bringing down the ban-hammer, you can get away with murder. Almost.

If newspapers and other fora want good quality, humane discussion where intelligence wins over foaming-mouthed semi-literates, then they need to tend to the garden. They need moderators and editors. If commentators are treated politely but firmly, get feedback from the editorial team, know the rules and are encouraged to participate civilly through example then that is what will happen. Mostly.

picture credit: anjan58

Anyway, what do you reckon? Reckon away!