The danger of speaking from the shadows

The Rob Kling Center for Social Informatics at Indiana University in Bloomington has tracked anonymous communications on the Internet since the late 1990s. Underlying concerns were validated in May when Blaise Cronin, dean of the School of Library and Information Science, posted an essay lamenting the lack of civility among writers of personal Web logs (blogs).

"He was viciously attacked by people [from] all over the world - all anonymous," says Center director Alice Robbin. "These people would never have made these awful remarks if they had to show their faces or give their real names."

She says being anonymous provides an emotional rush that shapes the content of what someone says, as evidenced in responses to Mr. Cronin.

"They were so thrilled, and it was associated with antiauthority," she says. "They were taking it out on a dean."

If anonymity tends to invite negativism, observers say, then it needs to be carefully managed, both by those who request anonymity and those who grant it, to minimize the potential for harm.

But trying to marshal anonymity for the public good is complicated by the prospect that what constitutes responsible management of anonymity can vary from one setting to another.

In journalism, for instance, Ms. McBride of the Poynter Institute says reporters should grant anonymity only when they believe a source intends to perform a legitimate public service and when that source would unfairly suffer serious consequences for coming forward. Since the purpose of news reporting is to serve its readership and public good, she says, it is essential to ascertain a source's true motivation as well as possible.

"When people desire anonymity, most of the time their motives are inappropriate, but not all the time," McBride says. "Sometimes it's because you [as the source] want to get something out, and it should come out and you really will be harmed. But most of the time it's because you want to get something out, and you don't want to be accountable."

But in corporate management, the goals - and therefore the thresholds for granting anonymity - are different, says Kathleen Clark, a law professor who teaches courses on whistle-blowing as well as government ethics at Washington University School of Law in St. Louis. Here, companies stand to gain valuable information by collecting and investigating as much anonymous information as possible, even if it comes from a disgruntled worker with a personal vendetta.

"Companies are going to be concerned with the truth or falsity of the allegation rather than the motivation of the whistleblower," Ms. Clark says. "There's a place for anonymous speech because it's recognized that some things won't get said unless they get said anonymously. And yet there's the risk that anonymity will also allow unaccountable falsehood."

Across the board, observers agree that to provide anonymity is to open the floodgates for information of a radically distinct quality from that which has a signature at the bottom. Yet managing anonymity responsibly is proving to be a long-term challenge for a society that simultaneously values it and fears its destructive power.

"There is no one rule for anonymity," concludes Indiana University's Ms. Robbin. "There is no ideal.... It depends on context."

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