Christopher Poole, founder of 4chan has launched a debate while speaking at the SXSW interactive conference over the weekend by telling his audience that Facebook is ‘totally wrong’ when it comes to online identity. Mark Zuckerberg, and by extension Facebook, maintains that an individual have only one identity which should follow one around from site to site (some might suggest this demonstrates what a sheltered existence Mr Zuckerberg has led up to this point but more on that later).
While Zuckerberg keeps on promoting transparency in user accounts, this includes freezing the accounts of Chinese dissidents, journalists and bloggers like Michael Anti, who chose to use Anglicised nom d’plume professionally for ease of recognition and to avoid repercussions of a repressive state. Christopher Poole, himself better known by his 4chan handle “moot” believes if anonymity is what the client wants, then anonymity should be what they get.
Poole insists that anonymity allows users to reveal themselves “completely unvarnished, unfiltered, raw way.” He says that one of the things that you lose when you carry the same ID everywhere is “the innocence of youth” Precisely which version of 4chan Poole is looking at is unknown, when I Google 4chan ‘youthful innocence’ is the last thing on my mind but anyhow.
The civil action organisation Anonymous originated on 4chan and it doesn’t matter whether you agree with them on specifics or not, any right thinking person has to agree with an organisation which highlights hypocrisy and duplicity in those who would seek to govern us.
The point behind the anonymity issue is that you can say what you truly believe in a particular area using your real name or a made up one. If you have a strongly held belief that you want to speak out on then anonymity is an important issue. If things that you say on an online debate could be traced back to the speaker it could lead to repercussions in “real life” if they were outed or unable to speak anonymously in the first place. How often have you heard people say that they would never let their parents become their friends on Facebook as for them to know what they really got up to at the weekends would require a lot of explanation, Perhaps this is where we see what a blameless shallow life Zuckerberg has led thus far. Most of the rest of us lead the kind of lives where we wouldn’t like our social and professional to cross over, we don’t even want separate social circles to know what we’ve been doing let alone our bosses or parents.
Poole continues; if you are worried about screwing up and you have a great deal to lose then you’re not likely to take the chance to experiment. Poole compared the phenomena to a kid starting a new school in a new neighbourhood; when you move you get the chance to start over, if you have to take your previous identity with you you don’t get that opportunity.
Poole points out that: “The cost of failure is really high when you’re contributing as yourself.” With 4chan you can experiment as much as you like, sure trolls can take advantage but hey, that’s life, learn to deal with it because the alternative is a step too far.
In a programme which is designed to mitigate the needs of either group Poole is working on a site called canv.as which does use Facebook Connect although users can still post anonymously. Poole says that while end users can’t identify who has said what the back office at canv.as will be able to find out meaning that peole are discouraged from the most atrocious of online behaviour. He further acknowledges that he’s not had the success, financially, that he would have liked for his site. Advertisers are disinclined to place ads next to content that could be extremely contentious and unpredictable, to say the least.