Anonymity Online

I’m sure we’ve all experienced the trouble that the Internet can bring to us. Whether this is through wasting countless hours on social media, a site that displays some quite hilarious cat pictures or through the unpleasant experience of cyber-bullying.

The fact that the Internet protects who we really are in many ways is often the reason behind people feeling like they are capable of being much more honest and often very harsh towards others. This emotional disconnect is often what causes cyber bullying to occur as often as it does. Tragically as we have seen in recent history, it is causing more and more young people to take their own lives , which I think is a terrible shame. People are often bullied because of things that are key components of themselves, sometimes including gender and race.

Those two things are something that we as humans, cannot change about ourselves. These raise the issue of whether or not we choose to become someone else, or take on the image of someone else online to avoid these biases. Although, these things are often deeply engraved into how we react to certain things or come across to people.

For example, a woman and a man would most often react differently to someone posting some sort of offensive sexist joke on the Internet. The same could be said for any sort of racist comment. (Although, I hope everyone would agree that those would be gaining the same sort of reaction from almost any race.) These things would definitely cause a loss of anonymity online in some way. Having complete anonymity online causes huge problems not only to do with bullying but for people who partake in dating websites as well.

There has been a huge phenomenon lately often called being “catfished”. This happens when there are two people who are in an online relationship and one of the people in the relationship is not who they say they are. The anonymity of online can cause huge heartbreak and dysfunction for people who are the ones being deceived. Often these people who are lying about who they are do not even know the person that they are pretending to be. For me, if I found out someone was pretending to be me online, using my name and photo, to engage in anything with another person, I would be incredibly mad. To me, this could also be considered a form of identity theft. Now, as terrible as being catfished might be and as horrible as cyber bullying is, the biggest benefit of anonymity online is allowed people to be more honest.

This honesty without fear of backlash and having people know what you truly think can be incredibly helpful to gaining honest feedback and opinions of people around the world. A person’s view on the world and what is going on around them will forever be affected by the things that make up who we are; the things we can’t change about ourselves, whether that be gender, race or anything similar.