This is a guest post by Jamie Bartlett, Director of the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media at the think tank Demos. You can follow him on Twitter at @jamiejbartlett
About a month ago I was lucky enough to have coffee with Peter Kirstein, who made and ran the very first internet connection in the UK in the early 1970s, back when it was an academic project to help computer scientists share research results and valuable computing time. "None of us had any idea what the internet would become," he said cheerfully, "we thought it was only going to be of interest for us academics."
One of the things Kirstein -- still a brilliant, amiable professor at UCL -- certainly didn't expect was 4chan.org, which celebrates its tenth birthday today. 4chan is a simple image-based bulletin board, with sixty or so boards dedicated to a variety of subjects: Japanese anime, weapons, pornography, videogames. But the most popular board (the one everyone writes about) is "b", the so-called "random" board. If there is a Wild West of the internet, this might be it. There is barely any moderation or censorship, and almost everyone posts under the username "Anonymous" (the origins of the hacktivist group Anonymous as it happens). The only real rule is that nothing illegal be posted, though even that is occasionally broken. Users do, however, tend to follow more informal 47 Rules of the Internet, written mainly by /b/ users:
Rule 1: Do not talk about /b/
Rule 2: Do NOT talk about /b/
Rule 8. There are no real rules about posting
Rule 20. Nothing is to be taken seriously
Rule 31. Tits or [G]et [T]he [F]uck [O]ut - the choice is yours
Rule 36: There is always more fucked up shit than what you just saw
Rule 38: No real limits of any kind apply here - not even the sky
Rule 42: Nothing is sacred
/b/ neatly crystallises the problems and benefits of internet anonymity. 4chan thrives on it, and there is considerable community pressure on avoid posting under their own name. Anyone who does is called an "attention whore" or a "namefag".
Anonymity online has had a pretty rough ride lately. There seems to have been a spike in online bullying and trolling (or at least a spike in interest). Celebrities have been receiving rape and death threats from anonymous Twitter users, and teenagers committing suicide after anonymous bullying on Ask.fm. Many view anonymity as the cause of the problem: both Prime Minister Cameron and Shadow Secretary of State for Culture Media and Sports, Helen Goodman have
repeatedly called for sites to put an end to it. Not without reason, either. Studies repeatedly find that if people believe that they will not be held accountable for their behaviour, they will often behave badly. Cyber psychologists argue that we are more likely to be nasty to each when protected by the screen. More seriously, and without wishing to sound like a hawkish Home Secretary, criminals -- yes, including paedophiles -- use online anonymity to conceal their identity, making it easier to groom, sell class A drugs, extort, access child pornography, and more.
But there is another side to the ledger too: anonymity has a useful social function. Well run democracies have secret ballots. (Although there was much debate about it in the 19th Century).
During the Arab Spring, and now in Syria or China, anonymity allows users to expose human rights abuses without risking their lives.
Using a pseudonym helps users discuss sensitive and embarrassing subjects on health and advice forums.
Most importantly for users of 4chan, anonymity encourages people to post honestly and creatively. According to Christopher Poole, who was 14 years old when he set up 4chan, it "allows you to share in a completely unvarnished, raw way". As it happens, anonymity was important to people like Kirstein too, for much the same reason. The Arpanet pioneers who actually wrote the source code for the way the internet works were all academics who wanted to encourage other computer programmers to be able to work anonymously to improve the design and structure of the network. They thought of the blind peer review journal: the academic way to ensure ideas are judged on their quality not their provenance, meaning the best ones surface.
It worked for the computer sciences, and it works for 4chan too.
/b/ board is disgusting, awful, and deeply offensive. Although there is some self-policing (especially in respect of child pornography) there are plenty of times where extreme trolling tips into serious and sustained online bullying. /b/ is a man's world, and women are routinely ignored or abused. The downward evolutionary pressure -- everyone has to be more extreme than the last guy -- has lead /b/ to repeatedly phoning the parents of deceased, shouting internet memes down the line at them.
Yet 35,000 threads are started on 4chan a day, and it produces an immense amount of inventive, funny, creative content. It is a prolific creator of internet memes. Think back to 2007: did you ever open a YouTube link and unexpectedly hear Rick Astley's 1987 Smash 'Never Gonna Give You Up'? If yes: you were one of 20 million people Rickrolled that year. It reignited his career).
It is also responsible for Lolcats -- image macros of cats with human-like expressions and a caption like "I can haz cheeseburger" -- which have colonised the net, annoyingly. In July 2006, /b/ heard rumours that moderators on the children's avatar site Habbo Hotel were racist and/or not providing enough protection for young users from predators lurking on the site. A group of them "raided the site", all creating identical, suited, black avatars with afro haircuts, who started blocking popular hang-outs by standing in the way. Dozens of them blocked the pool, saying "Pool's closed" (sometimes adding, 'due to AIDS!'). Others lined up to form the sign of a swastika. It was meant to shock, it was meant to amuse -- each person had their own motive -- but either way, Habbo Hotel introduced better safety precautions. Following that, /b/ launched protests against Scientology, which ultimately led to the founding of the group/movement Anonymous.
As people continue to abuse anonymity, there will continuing pressure to make from governments and companies to link people's online identities to their offline ones. But surveys also show anonymity online is important to users. A recent poll by the Pew Research Centre found 86 per cent have taken steps online to remove or mask their digital footprints. Other surveys consistently find that privacy online is of growing importance to citizens across world. This debate will continue to run, and as usual, it's less obvious than it first appears. Ten years after it started, 4chan continues to grow in popularity: more than 20 million people visited the site last month. It has been called the "asshole of the internet" and the "internet's meme factory". Both labels are fair. With anonymity, that's what you get.
For more information about 4chan click here.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
