Anonymous Social Networking

Secrets and lies

SOCIAL media may have brought millions of people together, but it has torn many others apart. Once, bullies taunted their victims in the playground; today they use smartphones to do so from afar. Media reports of “Facebook suicides” caused by cyberbullying are all too common. Character assassination on Twitter is rife, as are malicious e-mails, texts and other forms of e-torment. A recent review of the academic literature on cyberbullying suggests—conservatively—that at least a quarter of school-age children are involved as either victim or perpetrator.
A new generation of smartphone apps is unlikely to help. With names like Whisper, Secret, Wut, Yik Yak, Confide and Sneeky, they enable users to send anonymous messages, images or both to “friends” who also use the apps. Some of the messages “self-destruct” after delivery; some live on. But at their heart is anonymity. If you are bullied via Facebook, Twitter or text, you can usually identify your attacker. As a victim of an anonymous messaging app you cannot: at best you can only guess which “friend” whispered to the online world that you might be pregnant. As the authors of the paper cited above point out, anonymity frees people “from traditionally constraining pressures of society, conscience, morality and ethics to behave in a normative manner.”