A study of the Anonymous.

[Tev]

So the Boston Globe ran a nine page story a few days ago that takes a look at anonymous posting and the people that practice it.

I snagged a few highlights but really it would be in your best interest to read the whole thing. I was rather enlightening all things considered.

Commence wall of text!

Anonymous commentary is a push and pull between privacy and trust, and the implications extend beyond news sites to include Web reviews for everything from books to technology to hotel rooms. Online postings can sway political opinion and heavily influence whether products or businesses thrive or fail. They can make or break reputations and livelihoods. On one side, anonymous comments give users the freedom to be completely candid in a public forum. On the other, that freedom can be abused and manipulated to spread lies or mask hidden agendas. With all that in the balance, the thinking goes, shouldn’t we know who’s saying these things?

Clearly, anonymity is under attack. Even the Chinese government has had enough, announcing last month it would begin a push to end unnamed online comments. And, really, there’s not much that officials in Beijing don’t already know about who’s saying what within their borders.
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If we hope to clean up the online conversation, we need a better understanding of the select group of people doing most of the talking. Studies have shown that participation rates in online social communities tend to follow something called the “90-9-1” rule. About 90 percent of the people are “lurkers,” that is, watching but not actively contributing; 9 percent are infrequent contributors; and 1 percent are, to borrow a term from the fast-food industry, the heavy users.

McDonald’s and Burger King have teams of researchers who do nothing but try to understand the patterns, desires, and quirks of their heavy users, their best customers. However, yet another unfortunate byproduct of anonymity is that news sites know precious little about their most active commenters.
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He has no wife, no children, and a job requiring just 20 hours a week. He doesn’t follow sports, doesn’t hang out at bars or go on many trips beyond the occasional visit to play the slots at Twin River, and isn’t involved in any organizations to speak of. But he is extremely active in his community. It just happens to be one that only exists online.

Despite his strong views, he is generally a responsible member of that community. Every once in a while he’ll find one of his comments on Boston.com has been removed because he went too far. (It’s a safe bet it involved Teddy K.) Occasionally, he’ll commit the common commenter sin of weighing in on an article without having read it, and be called on it when his objection turns out to have been covered in the fifth paragraph.

But, overall, he plays by the rules, works hard at this commenter job of his, and, in a way, serves his community. After reading his posts and spending time with him, I believe him when he tells me that, even though he’s anonymous online, he would never write anything that he wouldn’t say “mano a mano.” That, incidentally, strikes me as a pretty good standard for separating the stand-up commenters from the cowardly name-callers.
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But here are the people I didn’t hear back from: the screamers, troublemakers, and trolls (Internet slang for people behind inflammatory posts). Not a single one. The loudest, most aggressive voices grew mum when asked to explain themselves, to engage in an actual discussion. The trolls appear to prize their anonymity more than anyone else.

Michael Sol Pollens is not a troll, but he is a heavy user. He explains that he spent three decades as a private detective, focusing mostly on fraud investigations, before suffering a nervous breakdown. He turned in his detective’s license and began writing detective fiction. He quickly discovered that posting comments online could be a therapeutic way to kick off his early-morning writing schedule. “I get up at 4, fire up a little incense, fire up some rock music, and go at it,” says the 51-year-old.

At his most productive, he posts up to four comments a day. He is every bit as liberal as Xenophonic is conservative, but the appeal for his participation is similar, and he is equally focused on his “Recommends” standing. “I do enjoy the community nature of this,” he says.
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Then again, sometimes those impressions formed online can turn out to be off base. Yoshimi25 is one of the most faithful contributors to On the Front Burner, a Red Sox discussion board on Boston.com. On game nights, she’ll spend five hours or more on the board – posting comments before, during, and after the game.

Once when a troll attacked Yoshimi25, hurling ugly anti-Asian slurs at her, her friends on the boards rose to her defense. Most people assume Yoshimi25 is Asian. In fact, she is a blue-eyed Irish-American named Kelly. (She asked me not to use her last name, but agreed to be photographed for this article.) Her Eastern-sounding handle comes from her days practicing martial arts.

Yoshimi25 says that because the Front Burner message board is such an intimate group, the regulars on it tend to behave well, even though they’re anonymous. “Although I can say anything I want without consequences,” she says, “you should behave as though there are consequences.”
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Owens insists that a no-anonymity rule is not just good journalism but good business as well. “My competitor allows anonymous comments,” he says. “We don’t. We get 10 times what they get. My users are more willing to engage in conversation, because they know who they are arguing with.” Almost all the heavy users I spoke with said they would continue to comment even if they had to provide their real name.

While news organizations debate scrapping anonymity, the ground may be shifting beneath them. With all of our identifying information getting sliced, diced, and sold, by everyone from credit card companies to Facebook, is there really such a thing as the anonymous Web anymore? Consider this demonstration from the late ’90s by Carnegie Mellon University computer science professor Latanya Sweeney. She took three commonly available data points: sex (male), ZIP code (02138), and date of birth (July 31, 1945). Those seemingly anonymous attributes could have described lots of people, right? Actually, no. She proved they could belong to just one person: former governor William Weld. She tells me that 87 percent of Americans can now be identified with just these three data points.

Maybe the best approach to getting people to behave better online is just reminding them how easy it is to figure out who they really are.

Anyway what are your thoughts on the power of anonymity? Do you feel that the trend of forcing accountability back into the system is the way to go? Are there people even here that you feel you might take differently if they were more than an avatar, a screen name, and a random picture in the PYP thread?

Frankly I happen to like the freedom of the internet. I wish I could find the words to really expound on that more. I do realize that with freedom comes responsibility. I also feel that the internet as a whole does a decent job of policing itself within its individual communities.

Though it would still be funny as hell to find out that Smarty, for all his revolutionary ways, is actually a staunch conservative English national who contracts with Halliburton.