I think what happens when we have truly anonymous free speech, on places such as Reddit, Twitter, and 4Chan, shows that we are nowhere as civilized as we like to think we are.
I agree with you 100%, the anonymity gives people incredible courage, but face to face people are more likely to be civil. But I think that is because the threat of physical violence is high if you said such hurtful things to other people.
I don't know if that's necessarily true. Look at Facebook - people say mean and vulgar things under their real name all the time, often complete with a picture of their own face. Anonymity can be a factor in the way we treat each other, but it doesn't tell us the whole story.
I agree that there is a social control tempering the aggressivity and nastiness in individual physical interactions. But in a sense this is merely social norms inhibating people into not being themselves. I think the anonymity of internet is more similar to the anonymity of a crowd or mob. And mobs behaviour often isn't pretty.
The potentially extreme consequences of voicing one's opinions today (with every utterance permanent and Earth-visible) is also what creates the extreme nastiness seen in anonymous speech forums like Reddit or voting booths. If people could speak their minds freely, they wouldn't become that different under the cloak of anonymity. Since they can't, people's inherently nasty tendencies build up pressure and explode in anonymous venues rather than safely venting.
The real life interactions are much more civil because of the fact that being an a*hole gets retribution from the person you are being an a*hole to or from the society.
Perfectly nice people turn into psychos when they interact with people online. Observe kids playing games in real life, they are very rarely as vulgar or sadistic as on online games.
A walk even in the most crowded places is much nicer experience that an anonymous online place.
Oh and yes, the very few cases where anonymity is useful are exactly that kind of cases(whistleblowing, journalism targeting powerful figures etc.). These are rarities and are valuable but %99 of the discussion on the internet are not about these and I suggested a mechanism for anonymity anyway.
In these sort of arguments I don't really understand why civility in and of itself is valued. It only makes sense in a social situation that affords civility. For that you can make "giving up anonymity" opt-in, rather than opt-out (which is mostly what is being done a lot, from forums that force you to use FB accounts to tor users in various countries who have no easy way to opt-out of foregoing anonymity).
It is rather silly to quote civility when the alternative, the lack of anonymity, has terrible "real-world" consequences, as mentioned in the article.
the argument willfully ignores the many voices that are silenced in the name of shutting up trolls: activists living under authoritarian regimes, whistleblowers, victims of violence, abuse, and harassment, and anyone with an unpopular or dissenting point of view that can legitimately expect to be imprisoned, beat-up, or harassed for speaking out.
Can someone explain the rationale of placing civility ahead of the above consequences?
it is lack (or significantly lower risk) of pretty much any threat. In real life people with different opinions are punished in many ways, not just physical (is anything i'd say the pure physical punishment is probably among the least concerns). Being anonymous online (or hard to reach in some other way, like say residing abroad) allows at least some freedom of speech.
The argument is that online anonymity itself also creates real-world consequences, such as character assassinations, harassment, and downright internet crime.
If "Civility" means "being nice to each other", why shouldn't we value it, in and of itself?
This very site is a good counterpoint to your distinction. HN allows for easy creation of anonymous accounts, and doesn't do much to help you track who says what. And yet some people, by choosing to stick to their handle over time, build a reputation. And yet, even the anonymous people mostly behave, and we end up with a civil community.
Personally, I think the important factors for maintaining a civil community is a focus on civility, some overt selection of topics (vs. having a group that's about everything), and a lot of moderation work in the background that prevents the decay of standards. Social norms, unfortunately, don't maintain themselves.
> I don't disagree that anonymity offers protection against situations like this, but bear in mind that anonymity is very much a factor in the lack of civil discourse online.
We might lose some civility but we also gain a lot of honesty which is absent everywhere else now due to PC culture. So the question is whether we prefer sometimes uncivilized but honest discussion or a civil veneer of what people really think.
I agree we seem to have lost empathy. I think the thing the pseudonymous internet provides is lack of consequences for incivility. People will say far more hateful things in a FB post than they would to another human two feet away who can yell back. Same things happens in a car, yelling and screaming that we wouldn't do in person. We would just walk away and talk about the infringer behind their backs. However, that time and space is also a release valve; we move on and get back to life. In an online forum, it is non-stop and ever escalating. Truly anonymous or not doesn't seem to be the key. Most people in our social circle would probably agree with any bad take we had anyway. We've given everyone a microphone and everyone just screams over each other. And worse, we've made it infinitely profitable for companies to run the sound system on high. There is no easy path out of it as long as dissent prints cash.
Yes, people are braver under anonymity. Over the Internet there are more anonymous readers who can access a public discussion and a poster's real identity-- thus more chance that one of these anonymous readers are crazy enough to cross the line and exploit their knowledge of the poster's identity to harass them in real life.
Before the Internet it would've been a lot more difficult to read all these dissenting opinions/discussions but also harder for a person to commit harassment. My entire point is that the Internet is a double edged sword (But im sure we all know that already). That said, the pros do outweigh the cons :).
What you see in public and what people do in private are very different and always have been. I think the best public equivalent to private behavior is anonymous online behavior, as this lets people use their private persona in public with minimal consequences.
People say it anonymously on the Internet because, if said in the public square, they are often faced violence and censorship rather than rational discourse.
I agree - but I also think the opposite does not make a good society - a society where everyone can act with anonymity. I was quite impressed with Matt Ridley's book 'The Origins of Virtue' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origins_of_Virtue) it makes the argument that we evolved the capacity for altruism from the evolutionary benefits of reciprocity.
IMO there is a marked difference between city culture - where the chances of meeting a random person in the street again is virtually zero, and village/rural culture where if you don't know the person you bump into you are almost certainly going to be separated by a single degree. The former culture being less 'polite' that the latter.
My point is that, while we should have the freedom to speak, we should expect our speech to have some social consequences that should at least cause us to pause and consider those consequences. And I accept that there should be a balance here.
I would not want to live in a society that banned anonymous social media accounts, but I do think it would be an interesting experiment to have a civic social space where everyone was identifiable.
I believe free speech is important but to keep things civil, it has to be open who the message is from. Anywhere anonym messages are allowed quickly deteriorates to *chan levels. We have all seen this in most online games and forums. Human nature is only good if there are some sort of reckoning.
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