The case against blog anonymity

The Liberal Democrats’ official monthly magazine Ad Lib recently invited me to write a short article making the case against anonymity on political blogs.

The magazine has now been published. The original text of the article is reproduced below (although I haven’t yet seen the published version, which Ad Lib’s editors may in their wisdom have altered):

Liberator’s blog (liberator-magazine.blogspot.co.uk) does not allow anonymous comments, whether pseudonymous or completely anonymous. If you are familiar with political or media blogs, you will understand why. Behind the shield of anonymity, a small but vociferous band of infantile trolls and obsessive bores can ruin it for everyone else.

Comments are frequently obscene (e.g. Guido Fawkes), personally abusive (e.g. Guardian ‘Comment is Free’) or impenetrable banter (e.g. Political Betting). The majority of people find this intimidating and off-putting. They would rather participate in civilised and intelligent debate than a short-tempered, juvenile brawl.

Abusive commenters have certain things in common. They are mostly male. The petulant tone suggests they are mostly young. And they hardly ever use their real, full names, preferring to post anonymously or hide behind a pseudonym.

There are a few people with a genuine reason for anonymity, such as a politically-restricted job. Most anonymous commenters have no such excuse. Their motives are cowardice (because it’s easier to be abusive if your real identity is concealed) or pomposity (because you can acquire unearned status with a bogus authoritative persona).

Would we tolerate anonymous speakers at party conference, their faces hidden behind a mask? Of course not. So why tolerate it online? We need to reject the idea that the internet exists in a moral bubble, beyond the normal rules of human courtesy that apply elsewhere.

Getting rid of anonymity is not a panacea for abuse. But if commenters were obliged to use their real names, they would think twice before being obnoxious.

Whether anonymous comments are allowed is ultimately at the discretion of a blog’s owners. But I would urge owners not to indulge the anonymous. The world of political blogging would be much healthier if participants behaved like grown-ups and used their real identities.

Ad Lib has published another article alongside mine, expressing the opposite point of view. It’s wrong, of course.

Pause, reflect, deliberate, make a pot of tea

This blog post about the Oxford Comma turns into a wider consideration of the poor quality of most writing on the internet:

The internet has a much higher write-to-read ratio than traditional methods of mass content distribution. In television, radio, newspapers, books, film and theatre there is a hard division between a small number of content producers and a large number of content consumers. Not so the internet. Many of us go online with the intention of reading, but before we’re done, we’ve written a bunch of tweets, sent off a comment, or engaged in an all out flame war, almost always in the public domain.

Writing online is so nearly effortless that reading (not to mention reflection, deliberation and thought) has become a chore in comparison. It’s easier to jot off a patronizing, indignant or self-aggrandizing missive than it is to take the trouble to read the whole article or give fair consideration to the author’s perspective. Thus the vicious circle sets in…

Why go to the trouble of producing a balanced or inquiring article for a medium that encourages rapid-fire feedback over deliberation and reflection? And why, in turn, respond to that article with any semblance of balance in a medium that rewards bite-sized bluster over nuance and accuracy? And why, for that matter, bother reading the article at all, when speed is everything, and you’d better get your soundbite in now because they’ll be new outrages to decry tomorrow?

This may be hard for people with a short attention span to understand but, before you ever comment on a blog, read the post in full and any linked content, then pause, make a pot of tea, reflect, deliberate, make another pot of tea, then respond intelligently and courteously. Never mind if someone else gets in ahead of you – your thoughtful comment will look more intelligent than theirs.

Wisdom of the crowd or online lynch mobs?

It was not my original intention to publish a trilogy of posts (see the first and second) expressing scepticism about digital technology – not so much the technology as the associated shallow culture. But this, the third, was prompted by a remarkable interview with Jaron Lanier, one-time digital pioneer and visionary.

Lanier was one of the leading gurus of ‘Web 2.0’ futurism. Now, he sees the monster he helped create as a mortal threat to political discourse, economic stability, human dignity, and society in general.

The article is worth reading in full, but Lanier’s views on the effects of web culture on politics are particularly noteworthy. He is especially critical of the idea that ‘the wisdom of the crowd’ will result in ever-upward enlightenment. It is just as likely that the crowd will degenerate into an online lynch mob:

As far back as the turn of the century, he singled out one standout aspect of the new web culture – the acceptance, the welcoming of anonymous commenters on websites – as a danger to political discourse and the polity itself. At the time, this objection seemed a bit extreme. But he saw anonymity as a poison seed. The way it didn’t hide, but, in fact, brandished the ugliness of human nature beneath the anonymous screen-name masks. An enabling and foreshadowing of mob rule, not a growth of democracy, but an accretion of tribalism.

It’s taken a while for this prophecy to come true, a while for this mode of communication to replace and degrade political conversation, to drive out any ambiguity. Or departure from the binary. But it slowly is turning us into a nation of hate-filled trolls.

Most people have a capacity for cruelty but online anonymity enables them to unleash that cruelty with impunity. Worse, the web enables like-minded cruel people to cohere rapidly, via twitchy social networks, into a cruel mob.

On this blog, we have a relatively simple comments policy (see right-hand column). The kernel of that policy is to insist on everyone using their real, full name because it forces them to think twice before commenting. We refuse to accept anonymous or pseudonymous comments, not because all anonymous commenters are arseholes but because all arsehole commenters are anonymous.

The merchants of cyber-bollocks

Are you tired of self-appointed cyber-gurus? The digital quacks who claim to have seen the future and insist everyone must fit into their dystopian dream?

Steven Poole exposes these charlatans in a scathing piece in the New Statesman:

As did many religious rebels before them, they come to bring not peace, but a sword. Change is inevitable; we must abandon the old ways. The cybertheorists, however, are a peculiarly corporatist species of the Leninist class: they agitate for constant revolution but the main beneficiaries will be the giant technology companies before whose virtual image they prostrate themselves.

Cybertheorists’ jargon often betrays an adolescent hatred of the world in which they find themselves. Jay Rosen, a prominent ‘future of news’ cyber-guru, takes care at every opportunity to sneer at publishing institutions by pasting to them the epithet ‘legacy’: ‘legacy newsrooms’, ‘legacy media’. Another favourite cyber-adjective is ‘disruptive’. For most of us, disruption is annoying, but for cyber-swamis the more disruptive of established practices technology becomes, the more exciting it is.

One target of Poole’s ire is cyber-thinkers who abuse the notion of the ‘wisdom of crowds’:

Cyber-thinkers have run with the wisdom-of-crowds notion to a place that bears little resemblance to reality as we know it, high-fiving each other among the rubble of reason in a fatuous kind of hi-tech, misanthropic herd-worship. It can now seriously be proposed that there are occasions when “the smartest person in the room is the room”, as the subtitle of the cybertheorist David Weinberger’s book Too Big to Know, published last January, claims. Its weirdly self-undermining idea (perfect for a Ted talk) is that books are outdated and useless ways of organising ‘information’ and that the sum total of information is now so overwhelming that we may as well throw up our hands and concede that ‘the network’ knows better than we do.

If Weinberger’s thesis were correct, then his book would be disposable, because a random cohort of bloggers could be expected to come up with something far superior in a couple of weeks. Weinberger’s book is also cyber-typical for its pseudo-democratic hatred of any kind of expertise, and its cartoonish intellectual history, in the service of pretending that our age is utterly novel. “The internet,” he opines grandly, “enables groups to develop ideas further than any individual could.” So have writing and talking, since time immemorial.

The intellectual weakness of cyber-thinkers is encapsulated in a single sentence:

Cybertheorists... daren’t attempt to distinguish information from knowledge, because to do so would require them to perform the kind of intellectual triage that their rhetorical success depends crucially on avoiding.

Exposing the cybertheorists as clothing-deficient emperors was long overdue. As Poole explains:

Cybertheorists love to apply the adjective ‘smart’ to one another but, as a group, they are the most prominent anti-intellectual cadre of our day – little Pol Pots of the touchscreen and Twitter.

Do online political campaigns work?

The answer to this question is: it depends.

In a recent speech, Jeremy Heimans, co-founder of online petitions pioneer Avaaz, warned that online campaigners must build for the long term and that they should not confuse online tactics with a clear strategy:

Don’t fixate on technology. Movements are not internet memes, and one viral YouTube video does not make a movement. What we are trying to do in all these movements is build and consolidate power around important issues.

Heimans noted that recent responses to the subject of online campaigning have tended to polarise into two types, hyperventilation or sighing. The hyperventilators tend to make bold claims such “Twitter is changing the world, it made the Arab Spring happen”, while the sceptics dismiss online tools as less effective than real world, offline activism:

The funny thing about both of these extremes is neither of them tend to know very much about tools on offer.

This bears out what I learnt from master campaigner Des Wilson many years ago. Any activity deserving of the name ‘campaign’ should be (in Des’s words) “A planned, organised and sustained drive to persuade someone to do or give you what you want.” The internet and social media haven’t changed this; they can be highly effective campaign tools but they are still just tools in the box.

The rise of virtual activism across Europe

Florian Hartleb has an article on the LSE European Politics and Policy blog looking at the opportunities and dangers inherent in the emergence of ‘virtual politics’ in Europe:

New technologies bring with them the advantage of virtual activism and the possibility of grass roots movements in a democratic and global way.

Such developments also contain some anti-democratic tendencies, however, including the creation of a more passive and drifting base of support, less ability to hold leaders accountable, and the emergence of a new, narrower digital elite that has displaced the older, more traditional activist base.

Parties which can no longer rely on the notion of membership for their legitimising myth work instead on their digital presence; they find themselves suffering a loss of real members and general support, forcing them to turn to alternative resources to retain influence.