The Future of Anonymity on the Internet Is Facebook Rooms

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Danielle Citron looks at Facebook Rooms and sees a nice middle ground in the battle over anonymity on the internet.

Released last week, the new Facebook app is a place where you can chat with other like-minded people about most anything, from the World Series to 18th century playwrights, and because you needn’t use your real name when joining one of its chat rooms, you have a freedom to express yourself that you wouldn’t have on, say, the main Facebook app.

But at the same time, Mark Zuckerberg and company have committed to policing these rooms at the lowest level. If anything offensive appears in the app—hate speech, threats, spam, or graphic content—room moderators or Facebook itself can take it down. For Citron, a law professor at the University of Maryland and the author of Hate Crimes in Cyberspace, that is crucial.

“Maybe it’s partly a marketing move that Facebook is also getting into this space, but I’m optimistic,” Citron says. “This could be a sign that we’re starting to create a middle ground that takes advantage of the best qualities of anonymity.”

Over the short history of the internet, anonymity has come and gone in waves. In the ’90s, AOL, IRC, and Usenet offered a way for digital natives to meet and talk anonymously, giving them a new freedom to speak their minds without the fear that their words would come back to haunt them. But this caused problems, including things like hate speech as well as the ability to blatantly misrepresent the truth in a public forum, and eventually, we saw the rise to real-name networks, with Facebook leading the charge as it outlawed the use of false identities.

Of course, this takes away a certain amount of free expression, and now, we’ve started to move back in the other direction. This year, myriad anonymous sharing apps—including Whisper, Secret and YikYak—have emerged to let users air their grievances with little risk of real-life consequences.

As usual, there are problems with the latest tools. But Facebook Rooms attempts to find the right balance. “I think there’s definitely a pendulum swing, where we move and experiment with anonymity,” says Citron. “There’s certainly a destructive side to anonymity, as we’ve seen in Gamergate and other internet hate crimes. But anonymity also frees people to put their best self forward.”

Josh Miller. Facebook

Josh Miller, product manager for Facebook Rooms, downplays the importance of anonymity in the new app. He says that the point of the app is to be a venue for creative self-expression for users. But anonymity, or pseudonymity, still plays a role here. “Rooms is a space for people to talk about their interests without having to be anxious that it could be connected to their real identities,” he explains.

Increasingly, people have to be heedful of their online persona, and Facebook Rooms can help them do so, at least in small ways. According to one survey, 48 percent of employers will Google job candidates to see if any unsavory digital details emerge, with 44 percent of hiring managers searching Facebook directly. Facebook Rooms can help people express themselves without falling into this trap.

Yes, other venues for anonymous topic discussion already exist—notably Reddit. The problem is that such places are notoriously bad at policing content. The key to the Facebook app, Citron says, is that it will apply Facebook’s stringent community guidelines to content moderation. That’s a departure from the hands-off mentality exhibited by other anonymous apps in the past.

According to reports, Yik Yak has, on several occasions, been contacted by local authorities because of threats issued on the app. Recently, a female engineer named Julie Ann Horvath planned to quietly quit her job at open-source company GitHub because of a problem with an employer and what she perceived as the company’s sexist work culture—and then she was harassed with nasty rumors on Secret.

On Facebook Rooms, this won’t happen—at least in theory. The question is how well its moderation system will work. Other startups, including Whisper, boast “active content moderation,” but as a WIRED feature recently reported, that grueling work is often outsourced to a vast army of workers who review, then remove the offensive in real-time—typically only with broad categories for what they’re on the lookout for, and without rigorous editorial supervision.

Facebook will have to ensure a greater level of control. But at the very least, the company has taken a step in the right direction.