Reducing Anonymous Cruelty Online

This post describes a potential way for websites to limit the amount of cruel content released by anonymous users on their site.

Disclaimer: I haven’t actually tried this idea on any website I’ve created yet, but I think it might work well, and I’d be excited to hear from any website creators who do try it.

In order for the idea to work, users on the site need to have some form of reputation. I think the Stack Exchange network does this the best right now, by giving people reputation points for actions that are respected by the community, and decreasing reputation points for actions that the community disagrees with.

The idea is that people with high reputation on the site will sponsor anonymous content.

To go slightly more into detail, if you’d like to post something on the site anonymously, you create the post, but it doesn’t show up on the main site for everyone to see. Instead, only people with high amounts of reputation can see anonymous posts (and only if they want to see them). If a high-reputation user sees an anonymous post that they think should be shared, they can decide to sponsor that post. This will cause the anonymous post to be displayed on the website with a note saying that the high-reputation user decided to sponsor it.

I think the main reason why people post cruel content when anonymous is because they will never receive any form of punishment — the content cannot be traced back to them. Here, by asking high-reputation users to sponsor anonymous content, the responsibility for making sure the content is appropriate falls on the high-reputation user. That is, if the content does not conform to the site’s guidelines, the high-reputation user will face the consequences.

This is how the system functions overall, and if that’s all you’re interested in, you can stop reading here. What follows is some more details about how I believe this should be implemented.

Why high-reputation users?

There are two reasons for using high-reputation users as sponsors rather than allowing all users to sponsor each anonymous content.

1. New users are generally more judgmental of the site (they are considering whether or not they want to use the site), and if they see cruel content, they may leave.
2. New users are often easy for people to create. This would allow people to create anonymous content, and then create a new user just to sponsor that anonymous content.

There may be other mechanisms for dealing with these issues. For now, I’ve decided that having high-reputation users as sponsors addresses both of these issues well enough.

What should the punishments be like?

Even anonymous content that follows a site’s guidelines can be contentious. Usually there is no reason to release content anonymously unless it’s contentious in some way. However, the goal of this process is not to eliminate all anonymous content and to make high-reputation users afraid of posting anonymous content. The goal is to make it so that explicitly cruel anonymous content does not reach users (without their consent).

Thus, I think that the punishment for high-reputation users who sponsor cruel content should be less than if they created the same content under their own name. That is, we should cut the sponsors some slack, since the content is not actually their own words.

How exactly should this be done? I don’t know, and I think it will depend a lot on the site. But I believe it’s very important to ensure that slightly contentious anonymous content can be sponsored without the sponsors fearing punishment from the site itself. Otherwise, we risk that the anonymous content is never sponsored.

How do we stop high-reputation users from sponsoring their own content?

We don’t want high-reputation users lowering the amount of punishment they would face if the post fails to meet guidelines by creating anonymous content and then just sponsoring it themselves.

Thus, websites must establish a method of keeping track of who made the original anonymous post up until the point that it is sponsored, in order to ensure that the sponsor isn’t the original poster. Of course, this can be done in an anonymous fashion (for example, by creating a secure hash of the original poster’s username), but there’s a small chance that some websites will mess this up and accidentally make it insecure, so that anonymous posts end up not actually being anonymous to people who have access to the right data. It is the site’s responsibility to ensure that the anonymity of the posters is retained throughout such a process.

How a site implements this idea, and whether they do so correctly, is up to the creators of the site. I merely hope that this idea is helpful to some people as a potential method to limit the amount of cruel content posted by anonymous users.