“If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place”. This comment by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt probably comes closer than any other to summarising the received wisdom of our betters regarding online anonymity.
In the dawning days of the internet, the moral lodestars of the unipolar moment, such as Bill Clinton, envisaged the world wide web as an multidimensional highway of unfettered liberty, blasting through the last remnants of totalitarianism. Famously, he predicted that China’s attempts to police free speech online would be like nailing jelly to the wall. Now, the orthodox “liberal” position across western elites is that unsupervised discourse on the internet is the handmaiden of dictatorship and perhaps the gravest threat democracy has known since the downfall of the Third Reich.
Our own political and media establishment has got itself particularly wound-up about the subject, but has done so in its own uniquely dreary and parochial way. Where their counterparts in Washington and Brussels fret about Russian disinformation and the false consciousness of the masses, British MPs and journalists reckon the main threat is people insulting them on social media.
In the Father Ted Episode “Speed 3”, the only possible response that Father Clarke can think of to the impending disaster of Dougal being stuck on a milk-float with a primed bomb is the saying of Mass — because that is all he is ever really interested in doing anyway. Similarly, “is there nothing to be said for some more online censorship” is the inevitable answer of British parliamentarians to any and all real world ills, including the hacking to death of one of their own colleagues by a Somali terrorist with a machete.
In particular, much of the problem has been identified as emanating from anonymous social media accounts, especially on what we are now expected to refer to as “X”. The renaming of the platform previously known as Twitter is another by-product of its takeover by Elon Musk, whose attempts to relax censorship and remove left-wing bias from its moderation policies is blamed by the chattering classes for its descent into vulgar abuse (although they moaned about it just as much before). If users were forced to display their real names, so the thinking goes, the same social pressure that makes people generally behave respectfully toward one another in real life would apply to interactions on social media.
This idea is just as popular among prominent journalists as it is among MPs. Intriguingly, it’s often a popular idea among the kind of figures who in other contexts normally take a relatively robust stance prioritising the importance of free speech over the avoidance of hurt feelings. Clearly, many do not regard anonymity as having anything to do with freedom of speech at all; people should be free to say what they want, but should do so openly under their own name. As professional journalists, everything they’ve said or written has come with their own name attached (unless they write for The Economist, anyway) — and what’s good enough for them is good enough for anyone else.
The idea that the withdrawal of anonymity might inhibit the free exchange of ideas or the examination of controversial subjects is quite simply beyond the comprehension of at least eight-tenths of the sort of people who now serve in parliament, or who front establishment media outlets. As far as they see it, people being rude to them is a bad thing, and bad things shouldn’t happen. Transparency is a good thing, and good things should be compulsory, and since theirs is a dimension in which second-order consequences are imperceptible, a failure to agree with either of these positions is not a good look.
There are a huge array of pressures that influence what people are prepared to talk and write about
Quite clearly, this way of looking at the world leaves them blind to a universe of nuance. There are a huge array of pressures that influence what people are prepared to talk and write about. Some of these are formal, such as laws restricting speech in the name of safety, to the expectations of editors and party whips in the case of journalists and politicians. But beyond that, there are a far broader range of social, economic and political pressures that might induce either the professional or the amateur commentator to self-censor. Colleagues, friends, bosses, corporate HR, customers, your spouse’s boss, suppliers, your bank, your child’s school — all of these are now, and God forgive me for uttering the word; “stakeholders”, who may take an interest in things you write in the public forum.
I wrote a few months ago about how there are differing degrees of free speech in this country, depending not so much on what it is you want to say, but on who you are and the degree of social status that you enjoy. For example, in the many layers of inquiry that have belatedly followed in the wake of the Rape Gang scandal, we can see that those at more senior and central levels of the justice and safeguarding systems were able to address controversial subjects directly, where junior or frontline officials were clearly uncomfortable doing so. This is indicative of how laws that were drafted to prevent “harmful” speech, and to commit employers and public services to creating a “safe” environment, have created an atmosphere of low-level political intimidation. In practice, this is a result of ambiguously-worded legislation and the politically selective application of the precautionary principle.
Various pieces of legislation place such responsibilities onto employers; especially large employers. These include the Health & Safety at Work Act 1974, the Safeguarding Vulnerable Groups Act 2006, the Care Act 2014, and the Counter-Terrorism & Security Act 2015. But it is the Equality Act 2010 that has really provided the growth hormones for the expansion of a powerful new discipline of compliance professionals within large organisations. Since 2010, the number of HR professionals in the UK has expanded by around 70 per cent, but within that, the function responsible for monitoring related to “diversity” and “inclusion” is estimated to have grown 10-15 fold. While a substantial amount of this growth has been in the public sector, it has become a major part of life in large corporate employers, and even among smaller employers in the professional services sector, and in anything to do with care or education.
Physically, the growth of this discipline means the presence in workplaces of people whose responsibility it is to enforce emerging orthodoxies around race, gender, ability and sexuality. This is reinforced in regular training sessions for staff at all levels, and their input is often required in critical decision-making. In terms of staff, the growth of this profession, and the expansion of HR and safeguarding generally, has been fed by the huge expansion of the universities (themselves a prolific employer of such people) and the growth in the number of graduates. This new profession leans strongly female in composition, and the nature of the work also makes it attractive to those of a neurotic disposition. For boards and shareholders in the private sector, this expansion in headcount was sold as means of reducing both reputational risk and as mitigation in case of employment tribunals.
Above anything else, it is a cadre that is trained to be aware of downside risk — you should not be doing anything unless you’ve got a good reason for doing it. While the legislation sets out some very basic minimum standards in terms of what it means for an employer to create a “safe” working environment free from harassment, its ambiguity allows for an almost infinitely maximalist interpretation — especially as it is contained within multiple, non-cross referencing acts of parliament.
All of this is critical to the question of online anonymity, as public social media usage is well within the purview of the expanded HR profession. A member of staff who regularly engaged in political commentary under their own name online would, if they had any sense, always write as if HR were reading it. Whereas once upon a time, going after somebody’s job would have been the most extreme thing that could have been done in the case of a private disagreement — especially to anybody on the political Left — nowadays it is practically the first step in any online controversy. (“Twitter, do your thing.”)
For somebody in a corporate-type job, a quick LinkedIn search is usually enough to identify their employer. For those in education or healthcare, pupils, patients or their families will do the job quickly enough. Obviously, anyone working in the police or justice system will have people with a vested interest in identifying them online. Then, all that’s left is for somebody to take umbrage, tag the institution’s official account on the platform, and ask whether the individual’s expressed views represent those of the organisation. Whoever is in charge of the social media platform may just ignore it, but a complaint made in the right way will force them to escalate, if it is suggested that the individual’s views might put their colleagues or customers “at risk of harm”, or put the organisation’s “values” into question.
If police officers and social workers who were specifically tasked with identifying patterns in the most serious forms of criminality faced internal pressure within their organisations not to notice something as blatant as the rape gang phenomenon, imagine the pressure faced by a relatively junior teacher or accountant, talking way outside their formal brief. There is almost no conceivable benefit to any organisation in having staff opining on politics, society or culture on social media; there is only reputational risk. Pressure will be brought to bear. Firing somebody for views expressed online comes with its own risks, of course, but there is a hell of a lot an employer, or a vengeful HR officer, can do short of dismissal to make someone’s life uncomfortable, and get them to shut up.
But it’s not even necessary to work in that kind of organisation to be vulnerable to pressure of this sort, if you upset the wrong people online. If your spouse or partner works for such an employer, and the fact is identifiable from social media, then they are potentially at risk as well. Under the guise of ‘safeguarding’, school staff are increasingly being told that it is their job to monitor pupils’ political views for the purpose of counter-extremism mitigation, and their parents’ social media profiles are the most obvious places to look for that — especially if the child is disruptive or difficult in some other way. Activists and grievance mongers seem to regard corporate and government supply chains as a legitimate hunting ground for wrong-think, so if your small business has prominent customers with a DEI cadre, they can get at you that way too. Financial services companies seem to be the worst for this kind of behavior, with their bloated DEI departments, and are all too ready to withdraw access to banking facilities to those whom their drones find distasteful.
The overwhelming majority of MPs, along with most prominent British journalists, regard all of this as completely irrelevant. We have people whose jobs it is to investigate stories, report the news and pass comment on it. They are employed to do so by newspapers, press agencies and television channels. And then there are MPs whose job it is to debate political topics of the day in parliament, and to scrutinise legislation and hold the government to account. As far as they are concerned, there is simply no need for amateurs to concern themselves with such things — they were doing a perfectly good job of it themselves, thank you very much. And if people hiding behind the cloak of anonymity are making that work less comfortable, and less prestigious, by insulting them and mocking them online — all the more reason to shut it down.
Even the most tin-eared of politicians, and the most pompous of prestige journalists, still find it necessary to acknowledge that the quality of British governance in recent decades hasn’t been of the standard that we might wish. And nor has the environment of reporting and commentary in which it has taken place been anywhere near sufficiently robust. And yet somehow, almost all of those people agree that the most pressing concern is to stop people from being rude to them on the internet, and seem to think any resulting loss of scrutiny is a price well worth paying.
Social media … has played a central role in blowing open the bubbles in which complacent elites had insulated themselves
But social media, and especially Twitter, has played a central role in blowing open the bubbles in which complacent elites had insulated themselves from the consequences of their dreadful ideas. Its model functions on the mass of anonymous nobodies that act as its red blood cells.
The last figure in British public life who really knew how to handle anonymous irritants in his replies was the late, great Norman Tebbit. Those of my vintage who cut their teeth in political commentary below the line on his Telegraph blog, will remember how the old Meteor jet pilot turned Employment Secretary would return to his articles 48 hours or so after they were posted, in order to engage with those who had taken the time to comment. And so, the former Conservative Party chairman and Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster would dwell on the musings of “Bloke_in_Marbella” and “ZaNuLiebour”, and patiently draft his response, often addressed directly to multiple anonymous accounts; “as RubberChicken79 so eloquently put it…” etc.
Many of the comments addressed to Tebbit were downright vile; the most unpleasant frequently made mocking references to the Brighton hotel bombing and the maiming of his wife, and lamented that he hadn’t suffered the same fate himself. Plenty more were simply impertinent, vulgar, fatuous, or just so stupid they must have made the old man want to claw his own eyes out in frustration. But he understood that contained among the dreck was the wisdom of the common man, and occasionally the opportunity to hear something interesting or important that he might not have learned from the great or well-bespoke. He was one of the last of the type of canny politician who took the time to chat to taxi drivers or scaffolders, and he saw that the internet gave the opportunity to do that far more, with a broader range of people. It also meant getting some stick from the resentful and the inadequate and the outright deranged, but he had a thick enough skin, and the sense to ignore it.
The government Tebbit was a part of was the last British government to accomplish serious reforms by challenging consensus and breaking apart a cozy orthodoxy. This was because it was a government that contained some people, including the prime minister, who were willing to be unpopular with fashionable people. Many of the problems Britain now faces are because of similar orthodoxies that emerged from trendy consensus. But for much of the public, pointing out the way that the current settlement is failing carries far too much personal risk if they do it openly. If parts of the establishment and the commentariat are finally challenging that consensus in newsprint or in parliament, it is because millions of people slowly moved the window of what could be said in the public forum, pseudonymously at first. If MPs are fed up with abuse from people hiding their real names, they might want to reflect on the atmosphere that their own legislation has created, which has banished true freedom of speech for the mass of ordinary people in this country.
