Mahdis Habibinia | Executive Editor, Online
Featured image courtesy of Jasmine Wiradharma
Imagine Martin Luther King or Oprah Winfrey standing up in front of a mass audience to deliver their rhetoric—but from behind a curtain. Imagine Jimmy Fallon delivering satire—but he’s backstage in a broom closet.
Anonymity is a way for people to avoid backlash in certain political or sensitive contexts. What anonymity is not, however, is a way for people to cower behind their own words.
Why are some choosing to avoid having their names attached to their own opinion? Yes, there are the obvious reasons: to protect their safety, their future, their livelihood. But what’s the reason for the mundane, general, or trivial matters?
Anonymity has forced students into a corner: they want their opinions heard, hoping for a change or broadcast, but they don’t want their names associated with it. This may be due to a fear of rejection, alienation, or confrontation. It’s curious that in a culture of free speech, post-Doug Ford’s policy, that we still feel the need to stifle our opinions.
People often find strength and power in anonymity. In taking on an ‘anonymous’ name, they essentially become someone else, while still maintaining the luxury of broadcasting their thoughts and concerns.
Maybe we live in an illusion of a free-speech culture, masked by anonymity (pun intended). It’s also possible this mask has become a part of us, courtesy of the Internet.
It’s strange: in an age of social networks and communities where the majority of students voluntarily give up their privacy, exhibiting their full identity and personal information online, they still choose anonymity in journalistic publications.
When democrats fought for free speech, they envisioned the freedom to say publicly (within reason) what they think, without recourse to anonymity out of fear of persecution. For years, the benefits of anonymity outweighed its drawbacks. People felt more comfortable expressing themselves.
Now, the problem is readers cannot tell who you are or what place your voice has in a story, article, etc. Are you a troll? A robot? A Macedonian teenager publishing a story that the Pope has endorsed Trump?
Credibility is lost. Civil discourse is poisoned.
Sometimes, it’s imperative to have a name behind the voice, or else the voice is too small.
