Why Do People Want To Be Anonymous Online? – Lewis Nitschinsk (Transcript)

You see violence. You see assault. You see sexual harassment. You see abuse. Under the guise of the crowd, under the guise of anonymity, people can act in this truly horrendous manner, which has awful consequences for everyone else around them.

Why Identity Matters in Society

Now, taking a step back, it’s not an exaggeration to say that the world only really works as it does because we are all identifiable. Really core things to our social scaffolding, our reputations, cooperation, reciprocation, social norms, they all work as intended because we are identifiable.

Now, my background’s in social psychology and what social psychologists do, like all scientists, is we try and apply the scientific method, in our case, to understand human behavior. Why do people do the things that they do? And what research shows is that when we’re anonymous, we actually behave quite differently to how we normally would. We change our behavior in some way. And what psychologists argue happens is that we lose our sense of self. We become disinhibited, de-individuated, free from the shackles of social norms that typically guide our behavior.

The Internet: Anonymity at the Click of a Button

Now, of course, anonymity is not only being in a crowd at a music festival. We can feel anonymous in a lot of places, joining a protest or trying calling strangers in the middle of the night. These occurrences, they’re not exactly everyday things. There’s only one context, one space where we can be anonymous anytime, anywhere, with just a click of a button.

The internet makes being anonymous very, very easy. With just a few clicks, I can make a fake profile on any of the platforms. I could change my profile picture from me to my car or my dog, or I could even make a fake profile for my dog where I interact with hundreds of thousands of other people doing the same thing. You get the point. The options, the choices to be anonymous are endless.

So we know how anonymity changes our behavior. We also know that it gives us this endless freedom to be or act however we want. So who seeks it out? Why are people motivated? What do they want to do? Why do people want to be anonymous?

Research Findings: Goals and Motivations

To begin answering this question, we conducted surveys. We talked to thousands of people asking them what motivations they might have to seek anonymity, if any at all. And from there, we looked at what these were associated with. We looked at personality traits, how people use social media, and what people do online more broadly.

And the widest answer to this question, the most general answer that we found was that people seek anonymity because they want to achieve their goals. Things that they might not believe to be attainable or achievable when they’re identifiable, but for some reason, when you’re anonymous, they just become that little bit easier, little bit more achievable, and therefore, people seek it out.

The Dark Side: Online Toxicity and Cyberbullying

Problematically, though, one of the main reasons why people seek anonymity is because they want to behave toxically. They want to be mean to one another in some way. Online toxicity is a major problem. I think we all know this. One in five Australian teens have been cyberbullied or trolled online before. And perhaps more surprisingly, one in seven have been the bully or have been the troll at least once in their lives.

From our research, what we found is that people who are motivated to be toxic online when they’re anonymous, they’re more likely to be sadistic. They enjoy hurting or harming one another, seeing people suffer. They’re also more devious, they’re Machiavellian, in that they want to manipulate or exploit other people, often to their own benefit. In many ways, anonymity is the perfect tool for this. It’s strategically optimal for these people to be anonymous because it allows them to reveal all these malicious aspects of themselves, do all these terrible things without getting in trouble. There’s no social cost involved because no one will see them.

But it’s not only about the person. Bad people want to do bad things. They want to be toxic, of course. But it’s also something about the situation that really seems to amplify this toxicity.

Experimental Evidence: The Trolling Study

To look at this, we conducted a study, an experiment, looking at why people engage in trolling online. And what we did is we collected a random sample of people, people like you in the crowd, and we put them in two conditions. In one side, we had people feel really identifiable, really seen, really visible. In the other condition, we had people feel anonymous, made them feel invisible, not seen. And then what we did is we just had people join this online chat where they could talk about whatever they wanted.

And what we found is those people in the anonymous condition, they were more likely to write mean and nasty comments. They were more likely to troll each other than those in the identifiable. So what this shows is that it’s something about the situation that really does change people’s behavior. It really makes them do something that they might not otherwise do or maybe even immorally against.

And when you combine these two things together, if you have a person with these malicious intentions and you put them in a context where they can get away with it with no real cost, that’s how this sort of toxicity really seems to flourish.

A Real-World Example: The Adam Goodes Case

A terrible example of this is what happened to Adam Goodes in the 2010s. Goodes was an AFL player. He was this famous Indigenous footballer, an absolute star, one of the best of his generation. But in the back end of his career, he was booed relentlessly, largely for calling out a lot of the racist remarks that had been hurled towards him for much of his career.

And, of course, these occurred in the crowds at the stadium with yelling and booing, but it also occurred online. Weekend, week out, social media posts, anything about Adam Goodes would come with this tirade of comments about who he is as a person, really terrible comments.

In both cases, anonymity really is a key factor because people can only do this when they’re alone, when they’re in the crowd, when they feel anonymous. No one’s saying this stuff when they’re identifiable, when they’re one-on-one. But the people who want to be racist, who want to taunt or torment others, sought out these environments, they sought out the crowds of the stadiums, they sought out these online spaces to really show how they really felt. And it was a problem the AFL couldn’t deal with until Goodes had to retire from the game.

Beyond Toxicity: Creativity and Self-Expression

But it’s not only toxicity. People are definitely motivated to seek anonymity for other reasons. The internet’s not just a toxic environment. Our research also shows that it’s a really important place for people to share and engage in different ideas. It’s such an important space for creativity.

I have a friend who’s now a jeweller. He makes rings, he makes necklaces for a living. When he started, he just had this anonymous account, posting the rings he’d make. And, you know, when I was asking why, like, why do this all anonymously, he said that he’s just not sure if he likes it, if he’s any good at it, how other people will perceive.

And what anonymity does is provided this safety net. It made things a little bit easier to try new things. And if things went south, if he got bored, if he didn’t want to do it anymore, he could have just deleted the account, and it wouldn’t have been attached to his identity. No one would have known except the people he wanted to know. What anonymity allowed for is this safety net to launch his career and also master his craft, get him to a point where he wanted to be more public and now do what he does for a living.

Identity Development and Context Collapse

Beyond creativity, anonymity is also important in developing our identity and our sense of self. Figuring out who we are, it takes a long time. A lot of our teenage years are really spent with this deep uncertainty about who we are and how we’ll fit into the world. In many ways, social media doesn’t make this any easier.

On social media, you often have to post these singularized images of yourselves, ones that will appease everyone, because your friends will see it, your parents will see it, work colleagues, extended family. Everyone sees this same single image. In psychology, we call this context collapse. And it’s quite hard to deal with, because how I talk to my mom isn’t the same way as how I talk to my friends. Yet on social media, I only get one shot on the thing I post, and both groups are going to see it.

The consequence of this is that people only post about a narrow band of topics when they’re identifiable. Maybe they talk about their personal achievements or academic achievements, TED talks they’ve done, or maybe they talk about their holidays, what they’ve done on the weekend. It doesn’t give much to talk about different aspects of your identity.

As a result, a lot of young people now have secondary or multiple accounts, accounts maybe only close friends know, or maybe no one knows, completely anonymous. And it’s on these accounts that people can start talking about different things. They can look at different parts of their identity. Our research shows that people who are lower in self-esteem, maybe more self-conscious or more socially anxious, they’re particularly likely to create these anonymous accounts, because it provides them a blank slate to try out different aspects of their identity, figure out what works, what doesn’t, what they like, and it gives them just, you know, makes them feel a little less vulnerable while they do it.

Marginalized Communities and Safe Spaces

The final part of our research shows that anonymity is not only important for individuals, it’s also important for the safety and connectedness of many marginalized groups. Queer communities often connect and engage in these largely anonymous spaces, maybe like a Tumblr or even these days on TikTok, as it provides a space for people to come together with relative safety and have a community and learn and discover from one another.

And when you talk to people from queer communities, they often say they actually largely learned about their identity or even discovered their identity in these spaces. And without these spaces, it might have taken a lot longer for them to realize or know who they are. And those who seek these communities, they often have greater self-acceptance, more accepting of who they are as a person, and are also more comfortable maybe revealing their identity, coming out to friends and family, or being more public.

The Complex Reality of Online Anonymity

Tying this all together, I think it’s important to remember that since the dawn of the Internet, anonymity’s been quite divisive. Governments, the tech companies, journalists, entire books have been written on whether people should be able to be anonymous and the ramifications of allowing it.

A simple answer might be no. Of course not. We all see the vitriol and hate that can fill our phone screens when we scroll. These anonymous accounts creating turmoil, tension, and discomfort for everyone who’s around when they see it. Maybe if we got rid of anonymity, we’d get rid of these people. We’d have a more civil online discourse, maybe just a more pleasant society in general.

It doesn’t really paint the whole picture, does it? Like the crowds of a music festival, the Internet is this complex, dynamic environment filled with lots of different people from a variety of places, different goals, needs, aspirations. Some of these are deeply problematic, but others are also incredibly enriching. Some are even vital for the safety and connectedness of certain groups.

Conclusion

The next time you’re online and you see an anonymous account, I just want you to stop and think, who are these people? What are their goals? What might they be doing? Why would they want to be anonymous?

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