Freedom of expression means taking responsibility for what you write.
By Peter Scheer
A Chinese blogger, defying a government censorship decree, publishes information about the crash of a military transport plane. Another blogger, an Egyptian, posts photos of the scarred body of a teenager who was tortured by Egyptian police.
Both bloggers are anonymous.
No one can doubt these speakers’ need to hide their identities. Their internet postings are in the venerable tradition of the Federalist Papers and other revolutionary pamphlets and manifestos whose authors, also anonymous, had reason to fear prosecution for their political views. It is precisely for this kind of expression that the First Amendment protects speech of both named and unnamed authors.
The right to speak anonymously, at least in the United States, is well established. Regrettably, however, the right is also widely abused.
The internet is crawling with anonymous communications. Like digital kudzu, they spread from spam email to message board postings to entire blogs and websites. For all but a few, there is no discernible need or reason for anonymity. Writers enjoy the freedom that comes with anonymity, forgetting their obligations to their audience. First Amendment protection for anonymous speech has become, on the internet, license to avoid having to take responsibility for what one writes.
The promiscuous use of anonymity breeds distrust. Readers react to anonymous online postings with the same skepticism that they have for newspaper articles that rely unnecessarily on unnamed sources. They wonder if the anonymous blogger is a paid shill, or has some other conflict of interest, just as they wonder if a newspaper’s anonymous source is objective or has an ax to grind. And if the use of anonymity is not explained or apparent from the context, readers will question a blogger’s good faith, just as they may wonder whether a newspaper’s anonymous source really exists.
And anonymity corrodes the conventions of civil discourse, giving vent to impulses that, for society’s sake, are perhaps best held in check. Viciously personal attacks, racist screeds and paranoid rants are commonplace on the anonymous internet. While such atavistic displays may provide an interesting laboratory for Freudian psychologists, they contribute nothing to debate on matters of public interest. If you’ve ever been on the receiving end of this invective, you know that it is impossible to reason with people who are screaming at you from behind a one-way mirror. The volume of their screaming only goes up.
There are lessons here for fledgling bloggers and other practitioners of Citizen Media, particularly blogs that offer news and opinion focused on particular communities (defined geographically). These online publications hold tremendous promise as competitors for local newspapers and as vehicles for self-expression by community residents who previously had no means, save the occasional letter-to-the-editor, to make their voices heard.
These blogs, however, will not be taken seriously if their authors persist in hiding their identity. Bloggers must take responsibility for what they write. For bloggers who publish in the relative security of the U.S. (compared to, say, China or Iran or Singapore), fear of reprisals, the most commonly cited justification for anonymity, is greatly exaggerated. When a blogger in California mentions the risk of reprisals, he is really talking about the discomfort of having to stand in a supermarket checkout line next to a city council member whom he has criticized in online writings.
Awkward, yes, but not a risk grave enough to justify publishing anonymously. Bloggers forget that free speech is never truly free. The awkwardness and discomfort that derives from speaking one’s mind, and thereby giving offense to one’s neighbors, is the modest price that one must pay for the exercise of First Amendment rights. It is a price that good mainstream journalists have paid for decades.
Similarly, there are lessons here for newspapers and other media outlets that, in their rush to convert sleepy websites into “Web 2.0” engines of economic growth, turn over large sections of their online real estate to readers who post anonymously. This shortcut to increased website traffic is a mistake. Newspapers should not allow anonymous postings to their website, any more than they allow anonymous contributions to their Op-Ed pages. Persons who post comments on a newspaper’s website should be required to give their name, unless they can show a good reason not to.
Most anonymous speech is just digital graffiti. Although it is protected from government regulation under the First Amendment, private publishers—whether bloggers or news media websites—have a duty to take responsibility for materials that they publish. In all but the most extreme cases, taking responsibility means identifying the author.
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Peter Scheer, a lawyer and journalist, is CFAC’s executive director.