The power of anonymity – trolling for lolz

Members of the Anonymous group of activists and hackers. Credit: Vincent Diamante/Wikipedia Commons CC BY-SA 2.0.

Ah the internet – an incredible resource full of cats falling in the bath and videos of people chasing cheese down a hill, but also a place where talking publicly about harassment generates more harassment. The word ‘feminist’ is a billowing red flag to anonymous trolls it seems as this bake sale in Australia highlighting the gender pay gap found out, with one person commenting that ‘females should be put down as babies’. Because that worked so well for China.

This sort of Gamergate sexism is part of an overall issue of ‘trolling’ which I find interesting. Obviously the internet means that nobody knows that it’s you, and the filter drops. Not one of those people saying that they wanted to ‘rape these feminist cunts’ actually turned up at the bake sale to express their opinion over the battenberg. So is it the case that they actually felt like that, or that they did it for the sake of upsetting other people and as they were anonymous, nobody was going to find out it was them?

Looking for studies on how anonymity can cause people to change their behaviour for the worse, I found out that there’s something called the online disinhibition effect where people say things online that they would never say in real life to somebody. There’s also herd mentality and a perceived lack of consequences. This troll who was imprisoned for threatening two women she didn’t know on Twitter with rape (and she was a woman as well, which is why I didn’t automatically presume that the bake sale haters were men) said that she did it ‘for a laugh’ and because she was drunk. She couldn’t care less whether a woman was included on the new £10 note or not, she just wanted to vent at somebody.

There’s nothing new under the sun of course. Victorians had a craze for sending Vinegar Valentines; anonymous, hateful postcards with poems and illustrations declaring how much the sender detested the receiver’s table manners or informing them that they were a ‘nerve destroyer’.

Children will steal everything you own

How behaviour changes when the veil of anonymity is present, as well as the idea of mob mentality, has been interesting psychologists for decades. In the 1970s, one experiment looked at whether trick or treating children were more likely to steal if they were anonymous. The results showed that anonymity and being in a group meant that 57.7 % of the children took more sweets than they were told they could have.

However, this grumpy rebuttal by two social psychologists of Derren Brown’s crowd experiment where a masked audience influenced a stranger’s night out by voting on whether good or bad things should happen to him says that being in a crowd doesn’t automatically mean that we will behave badly, it’s just that we shift our behaviour towards the crowd’s norms. So if I go to a professional wrestling match, I will end up screaming at a guy to hit the other guy with a chair. On a bus, I just think it.

And there are cases where people just can’t help being good even if they are anonymous. This study looked at the results of a variety of altruism experiments and concluded that even when there is no ulterior motive, altruistic behaviour is still seen.

Internet = people are bad?

So is the internet broken? Are we doomed to endless repetitions of what happened with Microsoft’s Tay AI Twitter feed which became a ‘Hitler loving sex robot‘ within 24 hours of being exposed to the general public? It depends on who you talk to. Anonymity can mean that people can discuss very private subjects such as abuse and addiction and feel safer – a key tenant of Alcoholics Anonymous for example. It’s also why games like Second Life are so popular, because you don’t have to be who you really are.

So yes, some people will always use anonymity to spread hate-filled opinions, but as this study showed, online trolls are likely to be trolls in real life as well, being more likely to have ‘narcissistic, Machiavellian, psychopathic and sadistic personality traits’. So the internet doesn’t necessarily make trolls, it just means we’re more likely to hear them.