Real Names and Responsible Speech: The Cases of South Korea, China, and Facebook — Yale Journal of International Affairs

By David Caragliano Human psychology and market incentives make real name registration an unpalatable proposition both to netizens and to online service providers charged with implementing the policy. In time, this article argues, internet policy makers will conclude that real nam

Deliberation and Identity Rules: The Effect of Anonymity, Pseudonyms and Real-Name Requirements on the Cognitive Complexity of Online News Comments

How do identity rules influence online deliberation? We address this question by drawing on a data set of 45 million comments on news articles on the Huffington Post from January 2013 to May 2015. At the beginning of this period, the site allowed commenting under what we call non-durable pseudonyms. In December 2013, Huffington Post moved to regulate its forum by requiring users to authenticate their accounts. And in June 2014, Huffington Post outsourced commenting to Facebook altogether, approximating a ‘real-name’ environment. We find a significant increase in the cognitive complexity of comments (a proxy for one aspect of deliberative quality) during the middle phase, followed by a decrease following the shift to real-name commenting through Facebook. Our findings challenge the terms of the apparently simple trade-off between the goods and bads of anonymous and real-name environments and point to the potential value of durable pseudonymity in the context of online discussion.

Digital Social Norm Enforcement: Online Firestorms in Social Media

Actors of public interest today have to fear the adverse impact that stems from social media platforms. Any controversial behavior may promptly trigger temporal, but potentially devastating storms of emotional and aggressive outrage, so called online firestorms. Popular targets of online firestorms are companies, politicians, celebrities, media, academics and many more. This article introduces social norm theory to understand online aggression in a social-political online setting, challenging the popular assumption that online anonymity is one of the principle factors that promotes aggression. We underpin this social norm view by analyzing a major social media platform concerned with public affairs over a period of three years entailing 532,197 comments on 1,612 online petitions. Results show that in the context of online firestorms, non-anonymous individuals are more aggressive compared to anonymous individuals. This effect is reinforced if selective incentives are present and if aggressors are intrinsically motivated.

Why does Google+ insist on having your real name?

Google+ is the latest social network to demand people's real names. But why do they need them?

Warum anonym, wenn's auch persönlich geht?: Der Klarname bringt für den Hasskommentator Vorteile

Applaus tut dem gut, der bei Hassposts im Internet seine Anonymität aufgibt. Glaubwürdiger ist er zudem

Trolling democracy: anonymity doesn’t cause conflicts, bad site design does

‘Don’t feed the trolls’, people on social media are told. By forcing people to use their real names online, the managers of online forums hope to shame trolls into silence. But, J…

From Non-consensual Pornography to Image-based Sexual Abuse: Charting the Course of a Problem with Many Names

Every day, people’s most intimate moments are recorded, uploaded and circulated online without their consent. This gross invasion of privacy – commonly known as ‘revenge pornography’ – has become p...

Anonymity, pseudonymity, and the agency of online identity: Examining the social practices of r/Gonewild

A debate is currently raging regarding the value of anonymity online. On one side of the debate is Facebook, the world’s largest social network site. Facebook demands that people use their real names and is one of the leading forces behind the push towards a “real name” Internet. On the other side of the debate are scholars such as danah boyd and Bernie Hogan and sites such as 4chan and Reddit that view anonymity and pseudonymity as important to how people construct identity online. While much has been written about the benefits of anonymity and pseudonymity, there is a lack of published research examining specific practices enabled by pseudonyms. This paper provides a detailed account of the behaviors enabled through pseudonymous identity construction through a case study of the subreddit r/gonewild. The main contribution of the article is to provide a specific account of the costs of a totalizing embrace of the “real name” Internet.

Constructing and enforcing "authentic" identity online: Facebook, real names, and non-normative identities

Despite the participatory and democratic promises of Web 2.0, many marginalized individuals with fluid or non-normative identities continue to struggle to represent themselves online. Facebook users, in particular, are told to use “authentic identities,” an idea reinforced throughout the site’s documentation, “real name” and other policies, and in public statements by company representatives. Facebook’s conception of authenticity and real names, however, has created problems for certain users, as demonstrated by the systematic deactivation of many accounts belonging to transgender and gender variant users, drag queens, Native Americans, abuse survivors, and others. In view of the struggles of marginalized users, Facebook policy appears paradoxical: the site simultaneously demands authenticity yet proscribes certain people from authentic self-presentation. In this work, we examine Facebook’s construction of “authenticity” and show how it excludes multifaceted, fluid, or non-normative identities. Using content analysis and close reading, we analyze site documentation and data from The Zuckerberg Files (an online archive of Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s public remarks) to understand the platform’s mechanisms for enforcing authenticity. We find that Facebook positions itself as a type of administrative identity registrar, raising vital questions regarding the ethics and consequences of identity enforcement online today.

Designing the Social

This book explores the complex place of social media in young people’s lives and the role it plays in shaping how they understand and present their identity publicly on a wide array of platforms. It proposes a new theoretical framework, Comic Theory, for understanding identity performances.

You Can Form a Part of Yourself Online: The Influence of New Media on Identity Development and Coming Out for LGBTQ Youth

Internet-based new media are increasingly utilized by lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) youth, yet little is known about the ways in which it influences their identity developm...

The Right to Anonymity is Vital to Free Expression: Now and Always

“There are myriad reasons why individuals may wish to use a name other than the one they were born with. They may be concerned about threats to their lives or livelihoods, or they may risk political

A Queer and Feminist Defense of Being Anonymous Online

From the earliest days of digital communities, online abuse has been connected to anonymity. While concerns around the impact of anonymity, particularly for women, people of color and LGBTQ folks, is legitimate, this paper argues that a flat rejection of digital anonymity is problematic, foreclosing certain forms of queer and feminist praxis. To make this case, I turn to the platform politics of Craigslist. Using Craigslist as a case study, I discuss the persistent stigma attached to online anonymity, before addressing specific tactics of online anonymity associated with queer and feminist values of privacy and mutual aid. Drawing on accounts of Craigslist users who saw anonymity as a protective form of control over their personal information, I outline ways in which anonymity is not solely an enabler for misogyny and homophobia, and can instead (or rather, also) be a subversive tool for self-expression and intimacy.

Online abuse: banning anonymous social media accounts is not the answer

In the wake of the tragic death of Sir David Amess, some politicians are calling for a law banning anonymous social media profiles. But it’s not the right way to tackle online abuse.

Twitter says any move by Australia to ban anonymous accounts would not reduce abuse

Company’s public policy director says crackdown would stifle speech for vulnerable people who need to remain unidentified

Banning anonymous social media accounts will do more harm than good | James Ball

Labour’s Angela Rayner wants to end online abuse, but she fails to understand the lives of those outside the political and media bubbles, says former Guardian special projects editor James Ball

The web should remain anonymous by default | The Mozilla Blog

The unique architecture of the web enables a much higher degree of user privacy than exists on other platforms. Many factors contribute to this, but an ess