The Animosity of Online Anonymity

Juan A. Prieto
Jul 30, 2017 · 5 min read

It’s almost unfathomable that I was birthed to a world without the internet, and lived for two years thereafter in a reality where the concept of the global village was merely a utopian dream.

Now everything from the way I shop to the way I communicate with my family is being facilitated by my access to the internet, and its inevitable spawn, social media. Even the jobs I maintained as an undergraduate revolved around my ability to navigate the platforms available through them.

It’s been 23 years since the creation of the virtual global village, and it’s seeming more like a dystopian void we can’t wake from.

Let’s face it: the internet and social media are a social experiment which have completely redefined our lives, and millennials have been its guinea pigs.

I remember a time when my Facebook feed was full of irrelevant daily observations of my seemingly normal friends and family. I use irrelevant endearingly here, because I didn’t go on Facebook to get the latest tragedy in the world being fed to me live. I went on particularly to see what my aunt’s new baby looked like or what my friends were having for dinner that evening. They were just mundane tasks which required not analytics on my behalf, merely consumption of a regular occurrence. Now, I’d be damned if I were to find original content being expressed through the platform.

I strongly believe we’re creating a sort of collective consciousness, one which Facebook only encourages by notifying us when people agree with us through quantifiable likes or shares. Twitter even allows us to toss our ideas into a void, where they get shared and discussed without our need to even participate in developing our initial ideas further. If we find something disagreeable, we dispose of it by blocking it from our feeds. We’re developing a social world where a Facebook post is the new political pamphlet and a tweet the new State of the Union.

Though this has given a lot of marginalized voices access to an audience, another toxic phenomena is being cradled in this online world too.

I remember being 13 when the concept of cyber-bullying began to emerge, as the story of Megan Meier sparked a campaign to address it. It was a sign to the emerging generation that the virtual world we had at first thought to be disconnected from reality was in fact intertwined with it. Unable to escape the harsh social ostracization they faced at school, young teenagers ended their lives when the harassment followed them back home through MySpace. Tangible consequences were taking place because unregulated virtual anonymity was beginning to unleash our hidden animosity.

So when the Alternative Right emerged as an organized political force, it made complete sense to me. See, cyber-bullying gave me the context to understand the power of anonymity in a virtual world. I witnessed as anonymous racist profiles plagued public online forums, finding refuge in each other on meme pages like Reddit and 4Chan. Using comedy as a mask, they began to express their sentiments against the resurfacing of feminism, racial justice, and queer/trans advocacy. Before I knew it, it was evident that their jokes had ceased attempting to reach a pun. Just as it had given bullies of our teenage years the ability to be vicious without repercussion, online anonymity gave the most racist, sexist, and homophobic of our society refuge.

And in the same way that white masks and white sheets once protected the private lives of the members of the Ku Klux Klan, online anonymity gave way to a new brand of hatred.

President Trump shares a meme in which a clip of him in WWE is edited to depict him physically slamming CNN.

The CNN-meme scandal, however, just goes to show what sorts of cowards these anonymous racists truly are. When the identity of the anonymous Reddit user was discovered, and then later tied to racist and anti-Semitic memes, he was quick to issue an apology to protect his identity.

See, the anonymity of the internet allowed him to create racially charged statements and memes on the online world, without fear of it ever affecting his personal/social/professional life. When his identity was discovered, the white mask was removed and he was exposed to the reality that his ideas face social repercussions.

What does this all mean to our work in social justice oriented spaces? After all, our online presence often revolves around sharing personal narratives and stories. We boldly stand by our views, rarely hiding behind fake names or profile pictures. Unfortunately, this also allows those who remain anonymous online to track us and harass us through our accessible online presence. I’ve even had places where I work contacted by these masked bigots because I posted something online that offended them.

And none of this is new, folks who have fought for the rights we hold on to now continiously had their personal lives intertwine with their causes. They, too, were chased by masked-bigots who were too afraid to have their private lives be intertwined with their hateful worldview. They were also contacted and threatened for the sake of silencing them, because what they had to say threatened the core of patriarchy, White Supremacy, and/or cis-heteronormativity. It’s just that the platform has changed, and its easier for them to track our personal lives through the same profiles we utilize to express our political view points.

Though this has caused me a lot of worry in the last few months, I can’t find reason to back out now. My advocacy is as much my private life as what I do on the weekends, given that a lot of my life is molded by the political landscape. We just need to be mindful that our audiences are not just friends, family, and those who agree with us. Our audience members are also the very people whose unearned privilege we threaten with our voice.

Though the internet and social media have given us access to the world, it’s also given the world access to us.

Juan A. Prieto

Written by

writer | layout designer | political organizer | researcher #UndocumentedUnafraid | Twitter: @immig_rant | IG: @immig.rant

Welcome to a place where words matter. On Medium, smart voices and original ideas take center stage - with no ads in sight. Watch
Follow all the topics you care about, and we’ll deliver the best stories for you to your homepage and inbox. Explore
Get unlimited access to the best stories on Medium — and support writers while you’re at it. Just $5/month. Upgrade