Anonymity is Not Freedom

Mariam Cook writes “In defence of anonymity online“:

Online anonymity gives us so much more than we would gain from stripping it away. It gives us the freedom to know what people really think, for better or for worse. It is the essence of democracy for us to be able to conduct the difficult debates out in the open, where they can be challenged. Rather than trying to chain people to their names, we should be seeking to protect the current capacity we have to deliberate without fear of reprisal, and putting our efforts towards superior architecture for displaying, moderating and encouraging constructive behaviour in large-scale online discussions.

And, like others, she drags out the “glorious history” of great works published anonymously:

Works by Voltaire, Benjamin Franklin, Zoe Margolis and other great thinkers were all published under assumed names.

I have written about this before:

“The right to speak anonymously about politics is older than the Constitution,” [[ALCU] staff attorney Margaret McLetchie] said, alluding to the Federalist and anti-Federalist papers, which were published under pseudonyms.

Right. Has anybody at the ACLU actually read the Federalist and the anti-Federalist papers? Do they read the comments that people leave on newspaper websites? Have they bothered to note the enormous difference in quality, both of thought and writing, in those two sources?

Anonymity adds no value to speech that enters the world without value. We remember the Federalist Papers and Voltaire because they said valuable things. (Let’s see how Zoe Margolis is doing in two hundred years.) But anonymity did not prompt them to think and write down their valuable ideas; it just made it a little easier for them to spread those valuable ideas. Any assertion that anonymous online-commenters necessarily spread important, intelligent, and worthwhile ideas that otherwise would fail to enter the public discourse if their anonymity were stripped does not ring true. Who really believes that great ideas will remain concealed simply because the people who thought them up were too afraid to speak them without cover of anonymity?

(And Cook doesn’t bother to cite the inglorious history of anonymous claptrap that never moved anyone to anything more than an evacuation of the bowels. Nobody cares enough about that stuff to remember it in the first place. Hindsight bias?)

The right to free speech protects the expression of valuable and important ideas. We have no good reason to protect speech that is purely idiocy or abuse. Be sure: great ideas can slither into our consciousness by grating or even offensive means. But we protect them because they are great; if they generate controversy, they are probably worth fighting for and worth protecting. Unreasoned abuse, however, deserves no allowance to masquerade as controversy. When a public figure suggests a policy based on a theory that some citizen disagrees with, there is absolutely no value in allowing that citizen to enter the public discourse with nothing more than epithets and scorn. A competing theory, facts that contradict the disputed theory, or logical criticism—any of those would be fantastic. But anonymity is not going to make citizens better theorists, more familiar with the facts, or better critical thinkers; they must come to those things on their own, anonymity or not.

Cook suggests that democracy requires knowing “what people really think.” But if online anonymity in public forums has demonstrated anything conclusively, it is how few people really think at all. The internet is too wonderful a tool to be squandered by reducing it to a forum for people to parade their ignorance and foolishness. If people in online public forums were consistently showing their thoughtfulness, their civic-mindedness, and their desire to truly improve the world by discussing its problems and their potential solutions, then nobody would be complaining about anonymity. As it is, however, online anonymity has given voice to a despicable class of people who believe the right to free speech does not come with any corresponding responsibility to free thought.

People like Voltaire and Benjamin Franklin and the authors of the Federalist papers were fighting an establishment that threatened to suppress any speech it deemed unfavorable regardless of whether it was reasonable or thoughtful. The problem of idiots abusing online anonymity does not present the same problem: here it is unreasonable and thoughtless speech that threatens to choke out valuable discourse. The threat comes not from above, but from below, from the people themselves. Our government has demonstrated an enormous capacity for dissent, while our people have reduced themselves to verbal dung-flinging when their ignorance will not allow them to admit even the potential viability of opposing views. If the facilitators of online forums want to shine a light on the shenanigans and remove the possibility of anonymity, I have no complaint.

Let me be clear: anonymity is not valueless. It can be an important tool for people who live under a legitimate fear of collateral reprisal for expressing their ideas. But promoting anonymity in support of some vaguely articulated goal of safeguarding democracy by ensuring that we all know what everyone else “really thinks” is a spurious argument. We don’t need to know what everyone else “really thinks.” We believe in free speech because we want good and useful ideas to circulate widely, not to ensure constant and abusive yammering from people who prefer to enjoy the pleasure of talking without the work of thinking. If anonymity is just the lubrication required to keep more mouths moving and more keyboards clicking, then it may actually be deleterious to a healthy society. But if anonymity is deployed only to protect people from the less enlightened among us, who would punish speakers for spreading valid ideas they viscerally hate instead of responding with well-reasoned opposition, then anonymity is helpful.

Anonymity is not a good in itself, but a potential means to a good end. Over-prescribing anonymity, like over-prescribing antibiotics, will harm society more than it helps. The proponents of unrestrained anonymity, especially of online anonymity, decline to take a principled or judicious approach. They see any restriction on the “right” to anonymity as a threat to freedom. But they are wrong. We gain nothing, and probably lose much, by allowing anonymous idiots to run off at the mouth, both online and off. Protecting people from reprisal for their thoughtful participation in the public discourse, however—even when some people find it offensive—is infinitely valuable to a free society. (And disallowing anonymity may protect thoughtful contributors from the abusive reprisals of unthinking cranks and ideological zombies.)

The proponents of anonymity fail by their own inability—or refusal—to think critically. They seem to believe that all speech, no matter its content, is worthy of equal veneration as free speech. Who are we to decide what counts as idiocy or abuse? they ask. But even arguing whether particular speech deserves protection is better than a benign blanket of approval because it demonstrates our collective cultivation of the discourse. It says, “We care about the intellectual life of our society.” Cheerleaders for raucous and unrestrained noise from all corners have an unreasonably high estimation of the wisdom of the masses and of the likelihood that this wisdom will emerge spontaneously from discursive chaos, unassisted by our deliberate efforts to find and promote it.

Some speech contributes nothing to our society. It may even discourage valuable contributions from others. Advocating anonymity as a way to promote speech without differentiating between the value of different kinds of speech, or even admitting the potential for differentiation, does nothing to promote the improvement of our world by the spread of good ideas. It only offers an excuse to increase the noise at the expense of a signal.

Finally, just as anonymity does not necessarily increase the quality of the ideas in circulation, it is also not the source of idiocy or abuse. People who contribute nothing to the discourse, but who speak in greater quantity, with more emotional ardor, and less consideration for their neighbors, did not get that way because they can speak anonymously. Somewhere along the way, we failed those people. Maybe no one encouraged them to think critically as youngsters. Maybe destructive ideologies infected their minds. Maybe we never recognized the needs that drive them to impassioned and unreasoned opposition to reality. But there is no good reason why they should continue down that path under the cover of anonymity, using the rest of us as verbal punching bags. Anonymity makes abuse feel acceptable: you can spatter your verbal feces on others without fear of damaging your own reputation.

Like any other tool, anonymity must be used skillfully and not indiscriminately.