Are those who hide behind online anonymity cowards?

If online anonymity would be eliminated, many would simply fall silent. Would this be a great loss? Maybe not

Last week, I listened to the 3-hour-long Joe Rogan Experience podcast episode with Dr Jordan Peterson (28^th January). If you haven’t yet, I highly recommend you check it out.

One of the most interesting segments – in my opinion – came at the 48:00-minute mark when the conversation turned to the subject of social media anonymity and Dr Peterson’s criticisms of it. I found myself agreeing with his suggestions to limit online anonymity.

Until fairly recently, I tended to think of online anonymity as allowing people to state opinions and/or divulge important public-interest information without fear of reprisal. But I always felt that we shouldn’t fear speaking up and verbalising our thoughts publicly. Fear of the consequences of saying what one considers the truth eventually leads to silence.

I say this as someone who grew up in a country in which saying the wrong things about the government of the day could endanger your life – as my father and, by extension, my family learned in the early 2000s. This is partly why I have always been wary about Governments being able to know who said what.

Today, in the United Kingdom, although the State is not likely to behave like a South American “democracy”, many fear speaking their minds because they know about cases in which those who have voiced the “wrong opinion” have suffered ostracization, lost friends, got ‘cancelled’, or lost career opportunities. It’s not hard to see that if online anonymity would be eliminated, many would simply fall silent.

Would this be a great loss? Maybe not. Here is why:

Governments concern themselves with the security of their citizens and - if our leaders have some authoritarian tendencies - our governments will jump at the opportunity to expand their powers to monitor individuals (remember the Covid marshals in London?). Thus, it is not surprising to see national and supra-national governments – lead increasingly by authoritarian utopians – making overt moves to eliminate anonymity in as many areas of our lives as possible.

Eliminating online anonymity would certainly help to crack down on “hate speech”. Similarly, Central Bank Digital Currencies would prevent anonymous financial transactions giving authorities greater control over what we can and cannot do with our hard-earned electronic digits. If that wasn’t enough, however, countries around the world, including the United Kingdom, are simultaneously starting to pass new legislation to implement digital ID infrastructure under the guise of providing a more streamlined experience when using public services.

Social Credit System, anyone?

On the other hand, anonymity also has serious downsides for civil society.

Dr Peterson explains that online anonymity, can enable some people to attack, troll, denigrate, insult, and even send death threats to others and get away with it scot-free. He believes that online anonymity allows individuals to behave in ways they would not dare to in the real world where such behaviour would be challenged. Dr Peterson also believes that online anonymity fuels psychopathic behaviour. Consequently, narcissists/psychopaths have become over-represented in online public fora, creating a poor environment for productive conversation.

Dr Peterson suggests that some clear separation between the accounts of “real people” and the anonymous accounts could help tackle this asymmetry. I think it would be interesting to see how that would change online public discourse, especially on platforms such as Twitter.

During the same segment, Dr Peterson made an even more controversial claim, saying that “there is something cowardly about anonymous posting” and adding “You find the adventure in your life by standing behind your words”.

Even after I finished watching the entire interview, those two sentences lingered in my mind. While I considered these points further, the case of Amy Gallagher came to mind. Amy Gallagher is an experienced psychiatric nurse who chose to speak out about the fact as part of her training to become a psychotherapist, she was expected to attend Critical Race Theory (CRT) at the infamous Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust in London (the same trust which was recently forced to close the Gender Identity Development Service, which specialised in giving children puberty blockers) Amy questioned the contents of a lecture entitled “Whiteness, a problem of our time” and, as a result, was subjected to many internal investigations and suspended from the course. Fast forward to 2023 and she is now taking the Tavistock to court.

My point is that Amy could have just posted anonymously about the CRT lecture on Twitter and hoped that the Tavistock would suffer public backlash and eventually drop the ideological nonsense. But by standing behind her words she has now been thrust into the public eye and is leading a campaign to stop Social Justice Theory from being presented as fact in public sector training. Sure, there is no way back once you have spoken out and decided to stand behind your words, but this is considerably more exciting than tweeting anonymously.

Amy Gallagher is not alone in publicly standing up against the authoritarian progressive establishment. People like James Esses, Rosie Kay, Nigel Biggar, and others in this country have stood up behind their words too in recent times

Surely, it would not be reasonable to expect the breadwinners to risk losing their jobs without having a plan in case things get ugly. And it would be unconscionable to encourage people to act without caution when deciding to speak up. Dr Peterson advises: “if you are in a position where you are vulnerable because someone else has got control over your tongue, maybe you can work really hard to put some ground under your feet so you can’t be taken out so easily”. Which is quite similar, I believe, to what William Blake said on the subject:

Be always ready to speak your mind and a base man will avoid you.

In light of all this, bar some rare exceptions, perhaps online anonymity is no better than self-censorship. Speaking without standing behind your words does not go far enough. It signals that you are not ready to defend your own ideas and that you would abandon them to avoid personal injury. Moreover, fear of the mob, fear of the “progressive” establishment, or even fear of governments is what the Bible refers to as “fear of Man”. It is a trap.

The fear of man bringeth a snare, but who so putteth his trusts in the Lord shall be safe. (Proverbs 29:25)

Fearing Man will result in an individual doing the bidding of Man.

In the long run, this will lead a person in a direction they did not choose and perhaps one that leads to perdition.

I do not want the Government to implement measures to do away with online anonymity, perhaps it has its uses. But maybe Dr Peterson is right, and we should be ready to stand behind our words. And maybe we should fear being cowards, especially if what is asked of us is to stand against this sclerotic, delusional, utopian and woke Establishment.