I may have not made my point well about my own anonymity – let’s say that while I’ve got reasons not to link the “Tremayne” persona to my real life name, job and address that persona itself doesn’t get to hide behind anonymity because it’s the one I use for everything game-related. I don’t use another name to go and post inflammatory comments elsewhere, for example, so if someone doesn’t like what I say somewhere they’ll know it’s me wherever I’m posting.

Good point about separation… although the anonymity is definitely a big part of creating separation, and as I recall each of the Facebook trolls prosecuted here in the UK was posting under a false name.

I guess I’m an advocate of one online identity per person, firewalled away from their real ID unless they choose to ‘out’ themselves. Which is one of the reasons I don’t like Facebook, as they would insist on outing me for the sake of having marketable data on a consumer.

(Sorry, I know this is a fairly U.S.-centric way of explaining it.)

And for some people, access to power is used as a license to abuse others. So I don’t think it’s unrelated to trolling, although clearly some people will find ways to be anti-social regardless.

I think we’re going to keep seeing examples of internet trolls/anonymous experts taking out the anonymity of people they deem disreputable. Like Anonymous exposing child pornographers. Not sure how the free speech advocates would respond to that particular use of free speech, but you can imagine what might happen if they made a mistake and outed someone innocent.

You’re also setting up a double-standard where anonymity is fine for you because you want to separate parts of your life from other parts, but not for others with whom you disagree. This is one reason why free speech supporters tend to be viewed as absolutists: once you start judging who is worthy and who is not, you open up the door to value judgments about speech. This is fine, until a group decides that political dissent or speaking out against misogyny/racism/whatever is “bad speech”.

Finally, you’re setting up a strawman with your “child porn” comment. If they were indeed posting child pornography on Reddit, then this should be a case for the police. As far as I know, the U.S. government takes the exploitation of children very seriously and it carries severe penalties. Since there hasn’t been reports of busting a child porn ring on that site, I have assumed that the pictures are non-pornographic as I have no other knowledge of the site. You might find the pictures distasteful or the purpose of viewing them offensive, but that’s different than someone posting up harmful, exploitative pictures.

Of course there are limits – I try and keep my “Tremayne” identity pretty well separated from my real life name and job, but on the other hand I try and ensure that all of my gaming related posting is done under the one persona.

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/10/what-an-academic-who-wrote-her-dissertation-on-trolls-thinks-of-violentacrez/263631/

I posted a longer piece on my blog: http://psychochild.org/?p=1166

Anyone interested in this topic an feel free to bring discussion to my blog. As a warning: I may be a free speech advocate, but I’m not above moderating stupidity.