And the real anonymous trolls online are . . .
Like many geeks, I’ve spend the last couple of weeks happily playing with mad scientist Virgil Griffith’s new creation, WikiScanner. It’s a web application that reveals who has been making anonymous edits on Wikipedia. Surprise: it’s not a bunch of angry, unprofessional bloggers in pajamas. It’s the CIA, members of Congress, large corporations like Pepsi and Haliburton, and staffers at the New York Times and Fox News. Each of these groups is guilty of deleting unflattering information about their own organizations, or of posting propaganda about issues they’re directly involved with.
As somebody who has long advocated the use of anonymous speech for people who are vulnerable to political and social persecution, the revelations of WikiScanner are intriguing to me. Often anonymous dissidents and whistleblowers are tarred with the brush of “bad” anonymity — and by “bad” anonymity, I mean the kind of unbridled speech that’s full of slander, lies, and attacks. I’m gratified to see that the people engaging in “bad” anonymity turn out to be some of the same ones who have tried to deprive whistleblowers and dissidents of their right to speak out anonymously. There is still a place for “good” anonymity on the Web and in the media, the kind that results in truth-telling against all odds, in places where speaking out openly could cost lives.
In my column this week, you can read more about who is editing what on Wikipedia, and what it means for the politics of anonymity.
August 23rd, 2007 at 12:42 am
Hi ! I just wanted to say I liked your article so much, I’ve just translated it into French here.
You make a very good point, more clearly expressed than any thing I could find already written in French on wikiscanner, that the debate over Internet anonymity is really about the capacity of corporations and governments to control knowledge.
August 23rd, 2007 at 10:53 am
Merci bien!
August 27th, 2007 at 2:05 pm
I grok the notion that we forever need an anonymous outlet for people, who would otherwise suffer punishment for sounding the call, to raise an alarm. This aside, it really seems that the role of ‘forum for the oppressed alarm raisers’ does not seem to be one of the design roles of Wikipedia – though perhaps it is, in action, for epsilon of the pages. Further fodder for the pointlessness of wiki-anonymity, i’m not sure what anonymity is granted through [ip-logged] anonymous Wikipedia editing that wouldn’t similarly be granted by a person setting up a shell email account at one of the innumerable free domains and using that email address with which to register one’s Wikipedia account – it seems that the level of identity exposure is equivalent.
(Plus, requiring people to spend another few minutes of their life to go through registration steps might put a slow-down on all of the murder-inspiring vandalism that goes on over there.)
((Oh ya, and what’s up with a user not being able to lock their own User: page?))
(((ps. screw flanders)))
August 30th, 2007 at 9:22 pm
Heads Up: I just submitted a link to this column to slashdot.
Nice bit of reporting. I think people should take note.
Ta!