Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
Why do people not sign their own names to what they write on the internet, and in particular on this blog? I thought I’d ask people this in the form of an anonymous poll. But before I do that, I want to get the full range of possibilities, so I’ve decided to crowdsource the poll questions. To date I have a number of possible reasons someone might give for posting anonymously, which are not mutually exclusive.
Here’s the first cut of possible reasons why someone might post anonymously:
- I’m concerned that putting my real name to my ideas will cause me trouble at my work.
- I’m concerned that putting my real name to my ideas will cause me trouble at home or with my family.
- I’m concerned that putting my real name to my ideas will cause me trouble with my friends and acquaintances.
- I’m concerned that putting my real name to my ideas will cause me trouble at my school or university.
- I’m posting from a country which discourages freedom of speech.
- I’m concerned that someone will take violent exception to my views about climate and threaten me or my family.
- I feel more comfortable posting anonymously, but I’m not sure why.
- I’m concerned about putting any personal information about myself on the web for any reason.
- I find it easier to express negative views when I post anonymously.
- I’m posting from work on company time, or the equivalent (e.g. posting when I’m supposed to be studying).
- I don’t want people to be able to research my previous statements.
Now, my questions about all of this are:
- What else would be another reason that someone might have, that should be listed on the poll?
- What other questions (age, sex, etc.) would it be useful to know?
- How about the wording of the questions? Is it neutral, is it biased?
- Order of the questions? Which ones first, which ones last?
Many thanks for your contributions, the relevant ones will be included in the poll.
w.
PS – Please be clear that I’m interested in possible reasons people might post anonymously on WUWT, not a justification or an argument for or against posting anonymously. This thread is to design the poll, not to debate anonymity.
[UPDATE] Added from the comments, with my thanks. Note that in the poll people will be able to choose more than one response.
- I feel able to express more confident views if those statements aren’t personally attributable to me.
- I’m posting for relaxation – not “publication”.
- Using my real name is just asking for ad hominem attacks.
- I don’t know who might read the post and what they might do with it.
- I don’t wish to disclose my formal qualifications, or lack of them, or that I am in a different field.
- I can say things that I would be embarrassed to say in person.
- I’m lazy.
- I work with people who believe Albert Gore is a scientist.
- I work with clients/customers or in a market where skeptical views are not welcome.
- Metaphorically speaking, I have relatives in the old country …
- To be honest, I also say some pretty stupid things, occasionally, especially when imbibing the suds.
- I am concerned about identity theft.
- It’s a chance to let out my repressed wild and crazy inner personalities.
- Stalking is always a concern to a female.
- I have someone constantly Googling my name.
- It’s traditional since the beginning of the web to have a handle.
- It allows me to “compartmentalize” my opinions on very different subjects.
- I enjoy “trolling”, stirring things up.
- I have worked for oil companies, mining companies or agribusiness and it would likely be held against me.
- I use a moniker because it describes what I am and how I see the world in 3 words.
- I post anonymously for the same reason I do not register a gun.
- Who wants to be responsible for my stupid ramblings when I am involved with Jack Daniels? Not me!
- I am under an implied contract to never make public pronouncement under my name that might in any way embarrass or disadvantage any segment of a multifaceted corporate endeavor / large university / international organization.
- Greenpeace said “We know who you are. We know where you live. We know where you work. And we be many, but you be few.”
- If I posted under my own name, it would be tantamount to expressing my political views to all and sundry and in my industry/job/school would convey a lack of professionalism.
- I am concerned that my age, gender, ethnicity, educational level, etc are factors that can affect the people who read a comment and many of them unfortunately then respond in a biased way.
- I have been attacked for my views.
- It is like putting on a superman suit, you can say anything, be anything and fly anywhere. And if any-one with kryptonite strikes you down, what does it matter, tomorrow you will be Clark Kent.
- To express things I wouldn’t have courage to express otherwise, the same reason many students are hesitant to put their hand up in class.
- I’m not even half as paranoid as I should be.
- I don’t wish for my thoughts and comments from years gone by to turn up whenever someone does a search on my name.
- I enjoy putting forward an identity that says more about me than my name.
- It’s good that no-one on the internet knows if you’re a frog.
- It would be easy to connect up my posts, email address and ultimately my credit cards. Spam and fraud would then follow.
- I don’t want to be associated with my job when posting on technical subjects.
- I am concerned about the UK defamation law.
- In my country you could be targeted by the consensus people.
- I have a common name and use a pseudonym so that I can search for my postings.
- I am concerned it may cost me business/lose me funding.
- I want readers to judge my comments on their content, not their provenance.
- I plan to run for president and want to be able to change my opinions as may be convenient.
- I am pleased to get some protection from the cloud of gnats hovering around the net.
- A future employer might have issues with some of the things I post.
- Didn’t Zorro and the Lone Ranger wear their masks because of things like this?
- I am the sole support of others.
- I’m not British / American, and for an English speaker my name is difficult to remember / sounds weird / carries a silly pun / leads to misunderstandings.
- I think it is fun to call myself by my handle.
- I don’t care.
- My name is the same as a wanted criminal / bad person.
- I don’t want current comments being dredged up in a possible future political campaign.
- I want to maintain plausible deniability.
- Posting anonymously offers an opportunity for crowd-sourced criticism before having my name attached to a bad idea.
- I I do a fair bit of sub-contract work for companies that have bought into the green dream, so I’m invoking my very own version of the … uh … precautionary principle 🙂
- A rabid green has haunted me in other forums.
- I was stalked relentlessly by some creep who decided that it was fun.
Updates to the other questions:
- Would you seriously consider using your real name after a reasonable period of retirement.
- Would you prefer to be able to post under your own name?
- Career
- Age
- Sex
- Location
It has also been correctly noted that I am describing posting pseudonymously, not anonymously.
It strikes me that I haven’t looked at the other side of the equation, why people post under their own name … ah, well, one thing at a time. My own reasons for posting under my own name, in no particular order, would be:
- I want to be able to claim ownership of my ideas.
- I refuse to be intimidated by the dangers of the world.
- I am much better mannered when I have to take responsibility for my words.
- My claims tend to extravagance when I post anonymously.
- I grew up a cowboy, and criticizing someone from behind a mask of anonymity feels like shooting someone from ambush … and a cowboy can’t do that, it’s in the contract, ask Tom Mix.
UPDATES from the comments regarding posting under your own name.
- I am retired, and don’t care if people read what I post.
- I prefer to say what I think and feel anyway without hiding under a cloak.
- I don’t post anonymously because I have a martyr complex.
- I think it is cowardice to post anonymously.
- Because I don’t follow the herd.
- I say what I mean and am terribly honest at it.
- I believe it is simply good manners to identify yourself when talking to people.
- I have no concern about people reading my opinions a decade from now.
- I can’t lie with a straight face.
- I have to stand for what I believe as who I am, otherwise what I say is all posturing.
- I started posting under my real name after making an ass of myself anonymously in a blog comment section.
- Using my name forces me to keep my posts measured and decent.
- I feel uneasy posting anonymously.
- It’s a matter of clarity and honesty.
- If such things as climate change are important we should pony up and admit where we stand.
- I’m confident enough in who I am to not be concerned about what others think of my opinions.
- Since my work is not publicly funded or grant funded, I’m at liberty to say what I wish without concern of losing my job.
- A person of worth will stand up in their own name for what is right and against what is wrong.
- If they want to google my name, they should do it if they don’t have better things to do.
- I have never not posted with my own and real name. Why would I do otherwise?
- I feel free to change my opinion should I have reason to and will defend or dismiss my former opinions accordingly.
- It would be cowardly for me to hide behind an alias.
- A screen name feels like hiding behind a false front.
- I think that in the long view we as a society get along much better when we know each others names.
- If I have too little courage of my own convictions to sign my name to my opinions, why should anyone pay attention?
- I don’t fear professional retribution as most of my peers hold similar views to mine or are just plain disengaged from the topic of global warming.
- It’s a statement that I will not be intimidated.
- I am totally uninterested about what other people think of me.
- I’ve had my own name a long time and have grown attached to it.
- I consider my self responsible for my own opinions.
- If I write something, I’ll stand for it, or I would not write it.
- I dislike anonymity on principle
That’s it to date, I’ll add more as they come up. I must say that I find the variety of reasons much wider and deeper than I had expected. Ain’t life grand?
Indeed, I rather like this process of crowdsourcing the poll questions. It strikes me that this is a kind of appreciative inquiry that could be of use in other contexts where there is a wide variety of opinions.
w.
I think that your questions pretty well cover the most common reasons – but suggest that respondents need to be able to choose more than one when they respond, although this may make crunching the numbers harder. You could overcome this by using an optional preferential system, where respondents can number their reasons (if more than one) in order of priority – as long as the lesser reasons are still included in the results.
Having to choose just one of those would not provide an adequate explanation, in my case anyway.
The Internet is a very big place and you would think that posting a comment on a blog would be noticed by only those reading the blog and be rather ephemeral. However, comments in blogs are grist for search engines such a Google and your comments will turn up ANY time ANYone Googles your name for ANY reason. (Well they do for a name like mine that appears to be rather unusual.) This may not be comfortable for many people who may not wish their thoughts and comments from years gone by to turn up whenever someone does a search on them.
Too many people and organisations know too much about us already. It is not WUWT that is the issue
I simply enjoy putting forward an identity that says more about me than my name.
I view the interwebs as a medium for information and opinion exchange.
The message itself is more important than who says it, and so I don’t think it matters if anyone knows who I am and my true identity should not influence you in your thinking at all.
And, isn’t it good that no-one on the internet knows if you’re a frog… 8():
I am not posting anonymously, I am using a pseudonym. I use the same one each time on each blog I comment on, for consistency, but I do not want to argue with someone here who has seen a comment I might have made on a political or current affairs blog and proceeds to make tiresome assumptions. It helps keep on topic and to the point.
I have a family to support and mustn’t do anything to undermine that. There are a few (only a few) leftists at work who may or may not be of vindictive bent, but why take chances? Also I do scientific work in a non-climate area and just don’t see the need to sharpen my image. In private conversations I freely express my skeptical views and find people are about 50-50 about it.
“At this point you’re just an anonymous nobody on the internet”. Yup, that’s me Willis :). If my name was Watt, Mann or Hansen then who I was would be important. As I’m not then no one is going to care about me as an individual – so long as my ‘name’ is consistently recognisable.
The main objection is the likes of Google and the army of spammers and fraudsters out there. What’s to stop an organisation, legal or otherwise, consolidating people’s posts from multiple sites into a kind of non-cooperative facebook? If my name was John Smith I wouldn’t worry too much but it’s an uncommon name and would be easy to connect up my posts, email address and ultimately my credit cards. Spam and fraud would then follow.
Most of my internet postings are pseudonomynous, either because they are throw-away forum chat, or because I don’t want to be associated with my job when posting on technical subjects. Posting here, it seems more important that if I expect my ramblings to be read by anyone then I should at least put my name to them. If I post in other blogs, I may well chose to remain anonymous in order to keep a degree of protection from the fanatics, but frequently my comments there will be less substantive.
There is another substantial reason in the UK why both blog admin and blog commenters should favor anonymity. That is the current state of defamation law.
Debate online often becomes robust. No more so than in a discussion or in a pub, but the difference is that the ill considered remarks are permanently archived on line, disseminated around the world, and in the UK at the moment, each reading is counted legally as publication, and the amount of potential damages for defamation is a function of the number of times its been published.
The best advice to people running a blog in the UK is to bar from commenting everyone who insists on using their real name, and to require a pseudonym for all commenters.
If you do not do this as admin you may start to get threatening letters from people who commented aggressively and then decided they could not stand the heat when they got replied to. You risk being held to be a publisher of the comments, and you will get demands that the replies be taken down and apologies issued….
Insist on anonymity and a lot of this goes away. You cannot slander or libel a person who is not identified, since their reputation cannot be injured if they are anonymous themselves. You can insult them, but again, if non-one knows who is being consulted, how bad can that be? Don’t insist on anonymity, and you will end up screening every comment, which in turn makes you liable as a publisher….
Posts are a different matter. Your posts or guest posts you would expect to take responsibility for and screen.
One option more: there is no benefit for me in using my real name instead of domain related pseudonym.
It is a good but not necessary thing to have writer’s name whom to refer, if there is real discussion in a discussion forum. Quotations should be easy. It is easier to use ‘Willis’ instead of Esch..
I use Cherry Pick when I talk about climate change, because that it how I see current climate science.
I like the idea of anonymous peer-review. It is only important what I write, not my academic or other background.
I would like to see the poll broken down not only by country, but also on state in the USA and Canada, because your states are comparable to the European countries. You might be able to show variations in perceived pressure against revealing who you are then.
I myself live in a so-called democracy where the politicians are far more gullible than in the USA and therefore prone to all kinds of new belief systems, and thus large state-owned companies of which I am employed in one, have departments where they state company policy including the company stance on global warming and climate crisis. Speaking out against your company policy is not a criminal offense per se, but your loyalty is questioned and you are kept under observation until the company’s human resource department can find anything to attach to your file with a view to get you fired.
I once was a research scientist at the largest research institute in this country, and it was only my being very famous among the public (for something completely different) that kept me from being fired many years ago, as I unwittingly came to be quoted in the local newspaper speaking my opinion about some very high-up politician’s total lack of understanding of some technological question. Needless to say I quit shortly afterwards, being disgusted with the whole spit-licking of the leaders. Time showed that I was correct in everything and I got to know in secret that the politician would never be elected to a high office again, thanks to the revealed stupidity. But the irrational behaviour of the research company’s official spokespersons writing in the newspaper even without contacting me so that they could get to know what had really happened, scared me forever.
So – the conclusion is, it is scary to write even on this blog signing your full name if you are from my country, unless you can avoid being targeted by the consensus people. And – to paraphrase another posting a year ago or so – they are many and we are few.
Ask an interesting question.
Like why people post using their real name.
No one cares about the intentionally anonymous, or at least they shouldn’t.
I am very careful about who can contact me; due to unfortunate incidents in the past, I am not inclined to trust the entire world. Anthony and others who run blogs have my only and genuine email address and that’s as far as I am prepared to reveal myself.
It may sound a tad paranoid and that may very well be true, but my reasons are valid for me.
The possible answers are all related to the presence.
There is in my view increasingly less confidence that democratic systems will persist in the future and the internet doesn’t forget a single sentence. A perfect fundus for Orwellian governments.
Mostly so i can more easily find myself in discussions. I have a very very common name so i use this pseudo, it stands out more.
Secondly i’m hesitant to leave a reallife trail for eventual governmental stalkers to put me in their database. It’s also the reason why i use an L2TP/IPSec SSL tunnel. I hate being in databases.
I am a coward. If I post over my own name then my contributions to some of the unpaid charity and advisory committees I sit on will not be taken seriously since most of the members are warmists or sheep when it comes to CO2 etc.
I do try gently to inject a degree of scepticism on the few occasions when “climate change” enters the conversation, though.
” Would you seriously consider using your real name after a reasonable period of retirement.”
“Do you feel frustrated that circumstances prevent you from using your real name.” (both questions would produce interesting answers)
This is a thoughtful topic, Willis.
This site is a conversation, but open to anyone, so it is not a private group conversation but a very public one and I can understand anonymity when work or relationships are involved.
Personal names are neutral, so, I guess, are numbers, but replying to a name linked to the Black Plague is difficult, and some are almost Freudian in revealing the ‘inner’ person.
The persons sex would be interesting, females seem to have a natural, easy approach that softens the earnestness somewhat and it would be interesting to know their contribution by numbers.
The follow up to this will be interesting.
Some folk have multiple personalities but like to keep them to themselves most of the time.
Out here in blogoland you can let them all have an outing.
Anthony likes/prefers us to have the courage of our convictions and to show that he feels that using our real name shows such conviction. It’s his house , so it’s only polite to the host to use the coasters and air freshener.
*smile*
First, my thanks to everyone, I’ve added what I think are the ideas to the head post, using your words where possible. I’ll add more as they come in.
Let me know what I’ve missed, suggest corrections, keep the ideas coming.
w.
I use an anonymous Name in the post field(for several of the reasons cited above) but provide an email with my real name when making comments. I am anonymous to the forum but the blog owner knows who I am.
How many comment anonymously to the blog/forum while also being anonymous to the blog/forum owner? I generally don’t, if I feel I have to be anonymous with the blog/forum owner, I don’t think I really need to be commenting at that blog/forum.
– People may avoid what you have to say and attack your personal life, lifestyle, religious beliefs etc. It’s not about me
– A working climate scientist who is a closet sceptic and worries about funding implications.
– A working scientist who is a closet sceptic and worries about funding implications.
“I work with clients/customers or in a market where skeptical views are not welcome.”
If I published my name, then I am out of business
Add career, age, sex
Well, my surname is simply long and tedious… (van den Bergh) So: first name and abbreviation of where I live (Hout Bay, Cape Town). I read a lot here and find that mostly some-one else has said what’s on my mind by the time I read the blog, so no need to repeat. Otherwise not trying to be anonomous.