Anonymity breads vulgarity.

As I trawl the Internet I have found that when people are able to be anonymous they perform crude and offensive acts. Where I have noticed this behaviour is at the “comment” part of sites like youtube.com. I don’t care that people behave this way but I was just wandering as to the reason why they feel they can get away with it.

If you read the comments after the video ‘Trent from Punchy” on youtube http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=0RjC-vh06_c you will see that people are not afraid to vent their racist and elitist stereotypes. On user (freakytzank) says

“i live in roselands which is next 2 punchbowl, n i have 2 say he would b the cream of crop cos the whole area is just full of scums like that. FUkn pingasssss, hahaha best ambassador 4 canterbury area”

When I talk about anonymity I am allowing for the fact that you can see the username of the person. However this doesn’t offer any real world information. They are obscure (xitedbeava135) and gibberish and do not reveal the real ‘identity’ of the person. Without their real identity revealed to the world there is no consequence to rude behaviour. What can the website do? In my experience the worst that can happen is the banning and blocking of that username to that server or site. This proves to be a minor inconvenience and doesn’t stop the problem for people simply create another username.

I have a friend that plays an online war game where the player is part of a troop of soldiers that fight the enemy. It is set in a modern day country using modern day weapons, gear and machinery. For a while he found it entertaining to ‘hack’ the game so that he was able to see where the enemy forces were and to make his weapons more efficient. These actions were against the rules of the game and after about two minutes of such actions he was blocked from that server. To get around this problem he simply signed in under the same username to a different server. This proved to only be a minor inconvenience as he could continue playing the game as normal from then on.

The problem of vulgarity on the Internet is one that is not easily fixed. All the power in theory is in the hands of the website wizards. They can control who is allowed onto the site as well as the content of the site. People can simply change their online identity and continue their outrageous behaviour.