I’m cleaning out my RSS feeds and finding some great stuff I had left to look at later. One of those was a post by Erik Hersman from way back in August about anonymity and trust online. He was puzzled by some comments made by Marissa Mayer, a senior Google executive, concerning how anonymity was an enemy of trust.

Speaking at a conference, Mayer said,

“…I think it’s really important as we look at tools to think about how we can support fact checking, how can we guard against misinformation, how is there going to be established an element of authority and trustworthiness? …I grew up with the newspaper and the encyclopedia, which you could trust. And now you have blogs, which are held often as news and often aren’t factual. Or you have Wikipedia, which usually gets most things right, but there are a lot times there is vandalism or corrections that need to be made.”

“When you look at the elements of anonymity and the lack of accountability that happens on the web, it really does start to create doubt in the fibers of who can you trust… The physical world has been around a lot longer, and in the physical world you really can’t do anything anonymously. So when you look at systems online that break that paradigm where you can be completely anonymous, or be whoever you want to be, without any sense of history or of what you did last week, that’s not really reality and that breaks down the elements of trust and authority.”

I think there are a number of things wrong with these statements, including the points raised by Erick, that anonymity is an important defense against authoritarian governments. “Having these open, trusting, everyone-knows-everyone systems is all well and good when you live in the US. It’s not so good in other parts of the world.” I also think there are other problems.

The Premises are Wrong

Mayer has two premises which I think are flawed. The first is that “newspapers and the encyclopedia” are trustworthy. In my 19 years of experience though, I’ve seen that proven false time and time again. The New York Times was shown to be less than trustworthy thanks to Jayson Blair who fabricated and plagiarized stories. Broadcast news was shown to be less than trustworthy thanks to Rathergate. Even the Executive Branch of the government was proven to act and speak on falsities when Colin Powell spoke at the UN. Further, information has never been garnered solely from “trustworthy” sources; it comes from unverified and non-factchecked cocktail party conversations and grocery store gossip, too.

Secondly, the idea that you cannot be anonymous in the physical world is nonsense. It didn’t take the Internet to create anonymity. Sure, Bernstein and Woodward knew who Deepthroat was, but that is functionally no different than your ISP knowing who you are. And as for deciding “whoever you want to be, without any sense of history or what you did last week” only coming about with TCP/IP, that is innaccurate, too. Many a teenager reinvented himself at college and many an individual left town to start a new life. In fact, without pervasive communication technologies like the Internet, I think it is fair to say your history didn’t follow you as easily.

A False Dichotomy Between Anonymity and Trustworthiness

As for the substantive point, that anonymous discourse is inherently less trustworthy, I think it is lucky that this view isn’t true. Psuedonymity, which I view as persistent anonymity, allowed Hamilton, Madison and Jay to write the Federalist Papers under the psyedonym of “Publius.” American Revolutionary War pamphlateers were often anonymous, and countless whistleblowers, including those using WikiLeaks, have been able to inform the public via anonymous speech. As I said in a recent post, anonymity is essential for a free society.

The Supreme Court has recognized as much, saying

“Protections for anonymous speech are vital to democratic discourse. Allowing dissenters to shield their identities frees them to express critical, minority views . . . Anonymity is a shield from the tyranny of the majority. . . . It thus exemplifies the purpose behind the Bill of Rights, and of the First Amendment in particular: to protect unpopular individuals from retaliation . . . at the hand of an intolerant society.”

Anonymity can allow for even more trustworthiness, as in the case of election voting where booths and privacy increase our confidence that the voter chose without undue outside pressure.

Sure, anonymity has and continues to allow offensive, negative speech to flourish. But Mayer’s concern that anonymous online discourse drives its recipients away from engagement is less of a worry than chilling important speech by forced identity. Information, whether digital or physical and whether from anonymous or identified individuals, should always be verified and vetted. Unknown IP addresses have been wrong, but so has Dan Rather. I hope Google recognizes this and continues to allow online identities to run the spectrum of verifiability.

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