There has been a recent small controversy among bloggers in which a blogger who posts regularly under a pseudonym was “outed” by a blogger that he critiqued who posts under his real name.
In a related vein we recently had a poster dismiss the cites of another contributer, declaringthat the use of pseudonyms is “internet anonymously cowardly ignorant” compared to those who put their real names out there.
The debate: Does Whelan and our poster have a point? Is it “cowardly” to “hide behind” pseudonyms? Should information provided by a source who posts under a consistent pseudonym be discounted compared to information provided by someone who posts under a real name? Did Whelan cross a line by “outing” publius?
MHO: I respect the desire of those who wish to use pseudonyms and think that the quality (or lack of quality) of the post is determined by its content and not by the “reputation being put on the line” - pseudonyms actually can allow for more of a free discussion. I for one am aware that patient family members (I am a pediatrician) may participate here and recognize who I am; I would probably not be great in the Pit anyway but such knowledge does constrain my discourse to some degree anyway. I might at least more often be more blunt if I had started posting here under a pseudonymous name than what I use and sometime regret having not chosen one.
Whelan crossed a line and proved that one does not need to be anonymous to be cowardly.
It is not cowardly to use pseudonyms - it’s cowardly to attack pseudonyms. Arguing from anonymity requires your argument to stand up on its own merit and your rhethorical/bullshitting/lying skill. Arguing by attacking a pseudonym is just ad-homonym and attempts to scare the opposition away.
There are cases where it is prudent to use a synonym for your self-protection or the protection of your reputation or occupation - but that is no more cowardly than wearing a motorcycle helmet is.
At the board I mod, “outing” a poster gets an immediate permaban, and, I think, rightly so.
My legal name is irrelevant to the quality or lack thereof of my postings. Here, I’m “Oakminster”. My posting history speaks for itself. I’m either a dipshit or a fairly sharp cookie, depending on who you ask. Unless I choose to disclose personal information, “Oakminster” is all you’re entitled to know about me.
I can’t see how it’s cowardly at all to use a pseudonym, whether online, in a newspaper, writing a book, recording a song, performing in a play…
Pseudonyms have a long history of use and I think the ability to choose one’s own name should be the right of an individual. Wanting to be called something else depending on the activity is, well, up to the person themselves.
Besides, not everyone is given an awesome name by their parents. Why shouldn’t someone be able to choose the name they are known by?
But I also think that you have to accept some risk of being outed. If you guess the identity of an anonymous poster, revealing it is not very nice, but I don’t think it should be considered “out of bounds” (assuming the person isn’t keeping their identity secret to protect themselves from serious retribution). If you don’t want to be associated with your own writings, the onus is on you to keep your identity secret, not on everyone else to not try and figure it out.
Also, out of random curiosity, who does the board think is currently the most popular blogger who has managed to remain anonymous? Seems like once you hit a certain level of notariety, it gets pretty difficult to keep yourself from getting outed.
According to an article I recently read, Scientific American used to publish the street addresses of its letter writers.
As a teenager, I read mimeographed science fiction fanzines; they were full of letters (many from pro writers) with complete addresses given.
Now I won’t give out my name online without serious aforethought. Email makes it too easy to receive voluminous hate mail. Publicly expressed controversial opinions could be forwarded to my boss in just a few minutes time.
If I was independently wealthy, I might well post under my real name. Or maybe not. There’s no shame in using a pseudonym.
Emphasis mine. Who, if not the person choosing to use a pseudonym, is qualified to judge whether this is the case? Logically speaking, if somebody’s using a pseudonym they might have a good reason for doing so that you don’t know about. Doesn’t that force you to assume that the ‘exception’ you mentioned is always the case, and thus that outing people would indeed be “out of bounds” in all cases?
Saying otherwise just seems like inviting people to dismiss the valid concerns of the people they’re arguing against and ignore the exception for them, while claiming that other people should respect the exception for people they like.
I’m the only “foolsguinea” out there. I haven’t used my real name online since the days of the sixdegrees community, but I have used this name for over ten years. Granted, I do use one other alias in some fora, & I have a name I pretty much only use on Wikipedia for anonymity.
But I if posted as “Andrew Jones,” would that be more or less anonymous?
Outing somebody is without class, whether it be an anonymous poster or a gay or lesbian with the possible exception of great hypocrisy.
Using a pseudonym is not in and of itself cowardly, although those of us who like to do it sometimes, as at slashdot.com like to mock the practice, including ourselves, by pointing out that it really doesn’t mean a whole lot to mock someone for being an idjit by their real name and hiding behind an anonymous name spouting stuff that is not particularly informative. Saying that Prof Doofus is a conspiracy nut behind a pseudonym is a bit silly. Whether it amounts to cowardice probably depends on the entire situation. If you reregister a new account just to avoid being identified, that probably amounts to cowardice. If you just post under a usually used fictional name, it probably means nothing all by itself, except that it does have the initial appearance of anonymous cowardice that is probably really just irony.
Now if that person is also the sort of person in real life who sees an off duty employee doing something they don’t like in the way of first amendment expression and anonymously and secretly calls up the employer trying to get the employee fired rather than express to the employee disagreement, than the anonymous caller or poster is a complete cowardly douche.
To paraphrase Forest Gump, cowardly is as cowardly does. For someone to use a pseudonym or even less than a fully distinguishable name to cast aspersion and then try to avoid social consequences by pretending he or she didn’t strikes me as cowardly. If think if you are going to fling an insult, or out someone, you should fling the insult and then not deny that it was about a specific person and an insult. For example, when the OP DSeid used the word asshole in a context that insinuated that it applied to me, then denied he did so, then got the mods to say that is kosher her at the SDMB (because it apparently is, and no, I didn’t report the OP because it might make one of the mods “less than really happy”) the whole thing speaks of cowardliness. You either mean it or you don’t. Dissembling about it is the behavior of a jerk.
Let’s keep in mind that this is a debate, and not a IMHO.
I guess, but when I say “serious retribution”, I mean getting dragged out of your bed in the middle of the night and shot by an angry totalitarian gov’t, not loosing your job because your boss doesn’t like what your wrote on Straight Dope. Since Whelan new Publius was a TX professor, I think he could be reasonably sure that he wasn’t putting him in serious physical danger by outing him.
If your worried that your boss will fire you or your spouse will leave you or your friends will hate you because of the opinions your wrote on a website, the onus is on you to keep your identity secret, not on everyone else to help you do it.
Posting under a pseudonymn gives you the freedom to speak openly and honestly about topics like your workplace, family, friends or other real world relationships without compromising those relationships.
I don’t know if it’s cowardly, but it’s certainly a dick move, and ultimately a self-defeating one. By outing his opponent, he in effect said to the world : “I don’t have anything to counter what he (and the bloggers he quoted) says about me, not even my contemptuous silence”. Way to defend your reputation what’s on the line, Mr. Whelan.
Not that outing people is always a dick move - if someone extols the virtues of a product, posing as a user of said product, when he’s in fact a marketroid retained by the product maker, I think everyone has the right to know. But a fellow blogger expressing his honest opinion ? Retort or ignore. Don’t try and change the nature of the game, and don’t force your opinions on another. It’s just Not Done.
Besides, Whelan’s argument re. the value of one’s pseudonym’s reputation is bullshit. Every blogger knows that, and every forum patron knows that. Sooner or later, everyone realizes they’ve said a little too much about themselves or their friends/family/boss for comfort, or said things that came back to bite them in the ass, or they can’t say something they wish they could. They then have to make a choice : start a new blog/account from scratch, which completely voids one’s audience and established reputation, or soldier on. It’s really no different from RL that way. On the 'net, your pseudonym (and its history) *is *your real identity.
Here’s an example. There was a media site several years ago called Mediawhoresonline.com which was a brilliantly written collection of how players in the main stream media are deeply biased with collections of things that the various people like O’Reilly and Chris Matthews did that were hypocritical and non-neutral and in some instances, outright lies.
The writer and publisher was a very well connected political operative who was and still is very secretive about his/her identity. At one point the author of Bartcop.com who also likes to remain anonymous (but whose identify is ascertainable with google) was outed as being the writer. Bart is a friend of mine and was greatly flattered, but an analysis of the two writing styles were entirely different and Bart completely denied being MWO and the theory has now been generally rejected. My money is on Mark Felt for MWO authorship. (Just kidding.) Bart hinted that he does know who MWO is, but I’ve never asked.
I have it on good authority that MWO is a major well known D.C. political operative who would lose his/her livelihood and not be able to get clients put on talk shows if his/her identify were to become known. That is a good reason to post anonymously.
Why? The validity of the charge is based on the written record of Doc Doofus in comparison to what evidence is of reality. The argument, the cites, hold or do not hold just as strongly or as weakly whether or not the poster making the claim is me using a derivative of my real name, or someone else post under a pseudonym. And someone who calls someone else “an idjit by their real name and hiding behind an anonymous name spouting stuff that is not particularly informative” would deserve to be mocked just as much if they posted under a real name. The issue is not the pseudonym; the issue is that they don’t know what the fuck they are talking about and yet presume to attempt to mock someone else.
(As to your interpretation of what I did or did not say you were here,, after you attempted to justify calling another poster “internet anonymously cowardly ignorant” by saying that’s what you do at Slashdot, well once again, feel free to bring it to the Pit if you want to - or don’t - but this thread is about the concept that you and Whelan appear to expouse - that posts under a pseudonym are intrinsically worth less than posts or sources that “put a reputation on the line” - it is not about you or whether or not I think you are an asshole or explicitly stated that I did.)
Because I’m the person who knows and wants to reveal an anonymous person’s identity. If they didn’t want me to decide whether I should put them at risk, then they should have done a better job at protecting their identity or not posted at all. Since they did post, and I did find out, I’d say its not unethical (but also not very nice) for me to out them unless I think they would be subject to some sort of draconian retaliation.
Again, it’s not my job to keep someone else’s secrets.
