Report: Internet trolls more hostile when using real names

It’s counter-intuitive, but there is some reasoning to it.

Anonymity, we often assume, is the breeding ground for bad behavior on the internet. Among the gatekeepers of comment sections and social media sites, the conventional wisdom is that anonymity empowers bullies to voice hateful opinions without consequence. When unmasked by real-name policies, the theory goes, these trolls will slink back to their caves, taking the vitriol from Twitter, Facebook and other social media with them.

Not true, says Lea Stahel, a sociology researcher at the University of Zurich.

Stahel and a team at the university’s Institute of Sociology wanted to know whether anonymity really encouraged the worst kind of behavior seen in online “firestorms.” These are moments when a public figure or group evokes the ire of commentators, who direct thousands or millions of negative messages at their subjects. The harassment of women in the video-gaming community, known as “Gamergate,” and the recent attack on the Ghostbusters actress Leslie Jones are just two examples.

In research published this June in the journal PLoS One, Stahel studied comments on online petitions published on a German social media platform between 2010 and 2013. The data included 532,197 comments on about 1,600 online petitions. Commentators could choose to be public or anonymous. Contrary to expectations, the commentators with the harshest words during mass public attacks were more likely to be the name-identified ones than the anonymous ones (less than a third of commentators kept their names private).

By: Alan

Alan Colmes is the publisher of Liberaland.