Anonymity

When you read an article on a news website do you ever read the comments?  Unless it’s on a tech website, I try to ignore the comments because when I do see them I am amazed at how ignorant the vocal segment of our population is.  I look at these comments and I cringe.  I know I don’t feel that way, I have a pretty good feeling that most of the people I know don’t feel that way.  So it’s not our entire society that is at fault, the rest of us just don’t speak up as often I guess.

The outright hatred and bigotry that these people spew is horrifying!  It gives me the impression that the general public is fucking dangerous!  I know trolls are responsible for some of it but there are some people out there with very clear concise arguments, and their arguments frighten me.  This week alone I have read three articles where I delved into the comments section.  It was like being in a Hitler Youth recruitment office.  These people are hurling racial epitaphs and making arguments based on outdated stereotypes.  Many of the arguments reduce to “The Bible says so!”  So you can’t take them serious but you HAVE to.  These people are real, they are breeding and they vote.  If they organize, they can overrun us.

And that’s starting to happen.  Television news programs give us the headline, a detail or two and then they drop the line, “But let’s see what you have to say about this” and they’ll pull up comments from their fucking Twitter of Facebook page.  I’m not talking about Jerry Springer, this is the local NEWS and CNN!!!  I hate this!  I DON’T CARE WHAT THE LOCAL IDIOT SAYS ABOUT IT, JUST GIVE ME THE FUCKING NEWS!!!  And you know they have to screen out the really crazy shit but the comments are STILL nuts!  And every time the news “reporter” reads out a comment it gives an air of respectability and authenticity to the idea that the local mob’s opinion counts for shit.  It doesn’t.  But that won’t stop them.

I think that much of this is due to the idea that you have a screen name and the illusion of anonymity.  People get brave in their words when they don’t think they’ll ever get traced back to their lips.  I am willing to bet that if you had to give your real name and address when you made a comment that these outrageous statements dwindle down to a few nuts in basements wearing tinfoil hats.  Okay, yeah I know it’s not safe to put your real data out there because of fraud but you know what I mean.  If there was a way to make people own up to their statements, maybe they’d think about a few of them before joining the mob.

Accountability.  Maybe everyone gets one on-line account?  You sign up for every message board, every porn site, every class lecture, your church, your job… under the same account.  No more “anonymous” accounts.  And all your posts are logged under that account.  And when a person goes on one site calling for “x”, people from his “y” can see it…  This actually sounds a little frightening to me.  I have about ten e-mail addresses just for the purpose of separating my porn from my church from my job…  But the anonymous factor is the biggest blame in this mob mentality comment sludge.

But “anonymous” is not wholly at fault either.  I see this spilling over into blogs and e-communities where most people do know who is speaking.  People find their comfort zones and feel safe in their niche so they are comfortable in spouting off a lot of crap that they might not have done in person.  I’m guilty of it myself although I make a point of overdoing it so everyone sees the joke.  I’m the guy who refuses to put “lol” at the end of a statement just so everyone knows I’m joking.  Either you get it or you don’t.  I’ve been put in some weird situations where I had to explain myself because someone thought I was serious, didn’t get the joke.  But that’s okay.  Accountability doesn’t mean infallibility.  I can be wrong, I can refine my statement or even agree that I was out of line.  But if I say it without a face I don’t have to discuss, I can just spew.  And that’s all I see on many of these news organization comment threads, raw sewage spewing from the keyboards of the faceless anons.