Deliberation and Identity Rules: The Effect of Anonymity, Pseudonyms and Real-Name Requirements on the Cognitive Complexity of Online News Comments
| Author | Simon Beste,Alfred Moore,Rolf Fredheim,Dominik Wyss |
| Date | 01 February 2021 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0032321719891385 |
| Published date | 01 February 2021 |
| Subject Matter | Special Issue Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0032321719891385
Political Studies
2021, Vol. 69(1) 45 –65
© The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/0032321719891385
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Deliberation and Identity
Rules: The Effect of Anonymity,
Pseudonyms and Real-Name
Requirements on the Cognitive
Complexity of Online News
Comments
Alfred Moore1, Rolf Fredheim2, Dominik
Wyss3 and Simon Beste4
Abstract
How do identity rules influence online deliberation? We address this question by drawing on a
data set of 45 million comments on news articles on the Huffington Post from January 2013 to
May 2015. At the beginning of this period, the site allowed commenting under what we call non-
durable pseudonyms. In December 2013, Huffington Post moved to regulate its forum by requiring
users to authenticate their accounts. And in June 2014, Huffington Post outsourced commenting
to Facebook altogether, approximating a ‘real-name’ environment. We find a significant increase
in the cognitive complexity of comments (a proxy for one aspect of deliberative quality) during
the middle phase, followed by a decrease following the shift to real-name commenting through
Facebook. Our findings challenge the terms of the apparently simple trade-off between the goods
and bads of anonymous and real-name environments and point to the potential value of durable
pseudonymity in the context of online discussion.
Keywords
deliberation, anonymity, cognitive complexity, online commenting, social media
Accepted: 6 November 2019
1Department of Politics, University of York, York, UK
2 Technical & Scientific Development Branch, NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence, Riga,
Latvia
3Department of Social Science, University of Stuttgart, Stuttgart, Germany
4
Institute of Political Science, Department of Social Sciences, Goethe University Frankfurt, Frankfurt am
Main, Germany
Corresponding author:
Alfred Moore, Department of Politics, University of York, York, YO10 5DD, UK.
Email: alfred.moore@york.ac.uk
891385PSX0010.1177/0032321719891385Political StudiesMoore
research-article2019
Special Issue Article
46 Political Studies 69(1)
Introduction
Does anonymity – the ability to act publicly while concealing one’s identity – promote or
undermine public deliberation online? There are two general and opposed responses to
this question. One is that anonymity is dangerous because it enables the evasion of
accountability. Discussing a case of misogynistic abuse on an anonymous chat forum,
Martha Nussbaum observes that
the ability to create a new world in which [the abusers] exercise power and the women are
humiliated depends on their ability to insulate their Internet selves from responsibility in the real
world, while ensuring real-world consequences for the woman (Nussbaum, 2010: 85).
In a similar vein, Levmore notes that online anonymity allows ‘communication without
retribution’ (Levmore, 1996: 2192–2193). If the value of public deliberation is rooted in
its insulation from sources of coercive power (Habermas, 1996), then on this view ano-
nymity would seem to undermine it by introducing an important power asymmetry into
contexts of public communication. On the other hand, by insulating citizens from soft
social pressures or hard sanctions and punishments, anonymity can enable people to
speak in public with greater sincerity. Timur Kuran thus suggests that anonymity can limit
the dangers of ‘preference falsification’, that is, of misrepresenting one’s preferences in
order to conform to perceived public opinion. Preference falsification, on Kuran’s view,
can lead to the suppression of minority opinion, with the consequence that minority views
either weaken and disappear, or break out in sudden and radical bursts (Kuran, 1997:
261). This claim is echoed by Danielle Allen in her discussion of Creon’s regime in
Sophocles’ Antigone, in which it was only the anonymous chorus who were able to speak
truth to Creon’s power (though he did not listen), and from which she concludes that
regimes of enforced public silence may look stable, but are prone to ‘rapid, radical
change’ (Allen, 2010: 117). So anonymity can, on one hand, introduce power asym-
metries and the strategic use of speech in the public sphere and, at the same time, offer
release from demands for social conformity that can themselves reflect power asym-
metries (Asenbaum, 2018). A reasonable, if not especially helpful, general answer to the
question of the effect of anonymity on public deliberation would thus seem to be: it
depends.1 Assessing the question of the relationship between identity rules and the delib-
erative quality of the public sphere would thus seem to be something to be done on a
case-by-case basis (and we present such an empirical analysis in this article).
Before we go on, however, we should make an important conceptual point. It is com-
mon to frame the question of the deliberative value of anonymity in terms of a simple
dichotomy, a trade-off between the goods and bads of identifiability and anonymity. This
is how it is framed by the theorists mentioned above. This is also how it has appeared in
debates on policy with respect to online discussion environments. For instance, Facebook’s
(then) marketing director, Randi Zuckerberg, said during a panel discussion on social
media in 2011 that ‘anonymity on the internet has to go away . . .. People behave a lot bet-
ter when they have their real names down’, she continued. ‘I think people hide behind
anonymity and they feel like they can say whatever they want behind closed doors’ (quoted
in Chun, 2015: 105). Indeed, it was this same framing of the problem that led the Huffington
Post (HuffPo) a couple of years later to stop accepting anonymous comments in order to
reduce trolling and verbal abuse, one of the changes whose effects are discussed in our
study. This is also how it has been framed by a number of empirical studies looking at the
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