Earlier this year, Rumesya Ozturk, a Tufts graduate student, was arrested by unidentified federal law enforcement officers outside her apartment. In the months since, federal agencies, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), have increasingly turned to social media and online publications as tools for monitoring and targeting individuals. In response to these developments, The Hoot chose to anonymize certain articles—particularly those written by authors from marginalized backgrounds—to proactively protect contributors from potential retaliation or surveillance.
Being anonymous is not an option for in-person events on campus, according to university policies. Last year, the Brandeis administration banned wearing a mask or covering your face at protests. They claimed that this was in order to prevent individuals from off-campus from participating in protests. However, this policy leaves students vulnerable. Across the country and at Brandeis, student protesters, particularly pro-Palestinian protesters, have been doxxed, with trucks displaying their names, faces and addresses driving around in large cities. The possibility of being doxxed, as well as potential harassment by counter-protesters, has a chilling effect on free speech, with students potentially being more hesitant to protest due to this fear. Policies like Brandeis’ take away the option for students to protest anonymously, exposing students to these risks. However, there are other ways in which students on this campus engage with anonymous discourse.
Many Brandeis students might be aware of two anonymous social media apps: Fizz and Sidechat. Both apps allow users to anonymously post to a forum that only other students of their university can view. This creates an ecosystem where anyone can post anything, within the guidelines of the individual apps. Often, students take this anonymity as an excuse to publish any thought they have, with posts mostly focusing on ranting about frustrations, posting various memes and occasionally soliciting sex. The solicitation of real-life sexual encounters blurs the lines between the anonymous world and reality. The lack of a filter can, despite the claims of anonymity, lead to real-life consequences. Many users are not acting in a way that preserves this forum’s anonymity, posting photos of other students, detailed locations on campus and names of other students. The students who face the consequences of these posts are rarely the posters themselves, but instead the subject of the post. In the case of a data breach for either app, students could have their university emails leaked and all of the posts they have written associated with their legal name.
The TV show “Black Mirror” covers the complexities of anonymity perfectly, specifically through the season three episode “Shut Up and Dance.” The episode follows a young adult being blackmailed as he completes tasks of increasing insanity to prevent his secret from getting out. The viewer is not told what secret he is hiding right away, with the creators instead choosing to reveal what he did in the final few minutes of the episode. While we’re not going to spoil exactly what he did, it was an absolutely atrocious crime and the other people in his fictional universe deserve to know exactly what type of person they are talking to while speaking to him. On one hand, privacy is a right that all people have, but on the other, not knowing how terrible someone is can cause disasters.
While anonymity typically feels entirely unregulated, systems do exist to limit the complete free rein of writers on both anonymous form platforms and in journalism. On Fizz, you can report content that you feel is inappropriate, such as hate speech and posts that clearly identify individuals on campus. Newspapers, The Hoot included, read articles and decide whether their content fits within the paper’s ethics, philosophy and if they should be allowed to remain anonymous at all. These systems are still imperfect, however, as the immediacy of their implementation is limited. Hate posts can still stay up long enough for them to be seen, and even a few minutes is enough to do damage. Fizz posts must be reported after they are posted, and no article can be “unwritten,” simply stopped from reaching the general public, at least on that particular platform.
One of the biggest problems that anonymity faces on the internet is that, unlike in the real world, internet privacy is not a choice that one makes for themselves—it’s a privilege that’s been given to them by site owners. Discord was one of many companies to start demanding verifiable identification of users to prove they were of age in the face of regulations in the United Kingdom and Australia. It took only a few weeks for hackers to find the poorly secured database of I.D.s (which Discord claimed not to be keeping) and leak them, putting users everywhere in danger of fraud. What happens when one applies this security flaw to one’s privacy on an app like Fizz or Sidechat? What happens when a malicious outsider decides to expose this information to the public, leaving every terrible thing one wouldn’t dare say aloud out to be judged by all? This is the risk one takes every time they put their privacy in somebody else’s hands online.
The Hoot’s stance is this: We welcome anonymity as a way to encourage free speech. At this time, where multiple factors like government strong-arming or coordinated online harassment are exerting a chilling effect on freedom of speech, being anonymous can provide a way for people to freely share their opinions without fear of punishment, as is their right. We welcome and encourage members of the Brandeis community who wish to express their opinions, but do not feel comfortable having their names attached, to submit pieces anonymously. However, The Hoot does not condone anonymity in its worst form: when it is used to spread or shield harassment, hatred or violence towards individuals or groups. We will not, therefore, publish any anonymous articles of that nature. All anonymous articles are still subject to our editing process and editorial policies.
