Reading 10: Trolling and Anonymity in the Internet World
Note: Sorry I just realized when I went to post Reading 11 that I didn’t post this in my Ethics blog publication but just in my stories last week.
The anonymity of the internet is part of what makes it so enticing and powerful. I love that I can explore or search anything on the internet and no one (at least no one whose opinion I actually care about) will know if I don’t want them to. And it’s not even that I engage in particularly strange or embarressing behavior on the internet — there’s just something freeing about being in this anonymous environment where you know that no one is watching you and you can explore and learn so much. This being said though, I understand that trolling is problematic in many ways. I view trolling as any behavior on the internet that is purposely and unhelpfully disruptful — usually done anonymously and causing others to be hurt or upset in some way. I think that most social networks at least do a pretty good job of trying to surpress this behavior by allowing comments and posts to be flagged and removed — although admittedly they don’t have very sophisticated ways of removing it before it causes damage. The unfortunate truth is that associating our actions with a permanent and visible identity of ourselves is some people’s primary motivation for acting kind and ethical in real life — and on the internet where that identity disappears it is easy for comment boards to dissolve into harmful or incredibly silly conversation.
Learning about the Gamergate scandel was pretty scary, because it is obviously pretty unethical but there doesn’t seem to be a clear way to combat it, given its guerrilla warfare-esque behaviors. I don’t really know anything about video games or the gamer culture that was being referenced, but it’s definitely not acceptable for these people hiding behind their anonymous profiles to be spreading potentially false or at the very harmful information. This is one of many examples or harmful behavior on the internet, where one person’s critical opinion can be read by anyone in the world. It’s not super satisfying but I don’t really see a good solution to this problem. I don’t think it’s a freedom of speech issue — because I think this harmful speech is ok to be surpressed. I think there is just a logistical issue of identifying these comments and determining if they truly warrent removal. I see this potentially snowballing into a situation where people’s comments are removed even if they aren’t being nasty but some “trolling” algorithm marked it as such and that’s almost worst I think than the current situation.
I think that the anonymity of browsing the internet is great, but I think given the issues discussed above that requiring user authentication for anything that we add to internet content (posts, comments, pictures, etc) is fair. I like the idea of having a username or whatever is generally seen being anonymous if one wishes, but having a way to connect a profile with your real name that would be useful in situations where someone posts something seriously harmful and needs to be punished accordingly. I truly believe that online dialogue is generally productive and makes the world better. The ability to connect with people so far away from us and so different and share ideas is honestly just amazing. However, there’s always a few bad apples that can ruin the whole bunch. Ideally the internet will find a way to stop these behaviors from happening, but until then I think the best we can do is promote positive internet interactions and try to discourage people from trolling.
