Anonymity Versus Lying

Lee Siegel chats with Deborah Soloman and explains:

No, it never occurred to me at the time that I was doing something wrong. There are other people who appear anonymously on Web sites; they do battle with their detractors. Anonymity is a universal convention of the blogosphere, and the wicked expedience is that you can speak without consequences. What was wrong about it is that I did it under the aegis of The New Republic, as a senior editor of the magazine.

I think Internet-anonymity is a little unfortunate, but it's an understandable second-best alternative given that lots of people don't really have the option of posting opinions on controversial topics under their own names. That said, this just isn't what Siegel did. He specifically pretended to not be Lee Siegel under circumstances where the fact that he was Lee Siegel was obviously germane to the issue at hand. What's more, Siegel is a professional writer who published under his own name all the time, including on the very website where he was pseudonymously commenting. He had no legitimate reasons for anonymity and wasn't really being anonymous at all -- he was just lying about his identity.

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Comments

Who doesn't have the option of posting under their own names?

We haven't descended to the point where people are shot for expressing their beliefs.

Posted by: Jeffrey Davis on September 18, 2006 03:30 PM

In a weaselly way, one could argue that (at least at first) Spr**** didn't explicitly assert that he wasn't Siegel. But this just underscores the rule of implication here -- the assumption that each real individual acts in each context under just one identity. (Michael Berube's recent post on this makes the same point by highlighting some comment threads where he's violated this rule as a joke, making sure his readers know he's the one behind the pseudonyms.)

Posted by: Vance Maverick on September 18, 2006 03:31 PM

Jeff -- take "Armando", who had real reasons (short of mortal danger) not to use his full name on Kos.

Posted by: Vance Maverick on September 18, 2006 03:33 PM

What is that poem by Yeats where Lady Gregory announced to her enemies that she'd be beside her window every evening?

And consider William Alexander Percy. The KKK had clumsily tried to kidnap his father. William Alexander Percy went to the local KKK factotum and told him that if any harm came to his (Percy's) father that he and his friends would immediately come kill the KKK factotum. Whether he was behind the harm or not. Result: no further harm came to Percy's father.

The world's a terrible place with real bad guys and real bullies who have terrible options at their disposal.

Posted by: Jeffrey Davis on September 18, 2006 03:44 PM

I think the point here is more conflict of interest than anonymity. To me its fine to post or blog anonymously. What's unethical is posting opinions on areas where you have a direct stake. For example if you are the employed by a political campaign, its only fair to let your readers know this if you are going to promote a specific candidate, likewise you should disclose the fact that your brother was assistant director of a film that you are recommending. Obviously there are some grey areas where reasonable people can argue whether a certain relationship is close enough or recent enough to constituted a conflict of interest. But I think "yourself" is as close as it can get!

Second point: most of us have to work for a living and would like hiring and promotion decisions to be based on ability, not on whether our political views are congenial to our bosses.

Posted by: DanMD on September 18, 2006 03:57 PM

I don't use my real name because I want to say things that I don't want to have to explain to people in personal life. Like how everything I might talk about with my brother I might not want to share with my mom.

Posted by: Chris M on September 18, 2006 03:59 PM

I think the biggest problem with the sprezzatura affair is just how incredibly lame Siegel's posts were (both real and fake). Being a big dork is a firing offense.

Posted by: Chris M. on September 18, 2006 04:01 PM

Jeff, do you want clients who might disagree with you politically to see your views on Bush, etc. every time they google your name? I could definitely see it creating problems, I could see people being fired over even mildly controversial opinions. That's not getting shot, but it still really sucks. This stuff is obvious enough, you're probably being deliberately obtuse.

Posted by: MQ on September 18, 2006 04:24 PM

Who doesn't have the option of posting under their own names?

We haven't descended to the point where people are shot for expressing their beliefs.

Not often. But they could be fired - or demoted, or not promoted - for expressing their beliefs. Or they could lose business from customers who don't want to buy things from people who have those beliefs. Or they could be denied a building permit; or their children could be harrassed; or their friends and family could abandon them; or their church could expel them; or they could receive threatening emails or phone calls.

And then of course there are those people who live in gun-filled environments who really could be shot for expressing certain beliefs, or for engaging in various kinds of online whistle-blowing - soldiers and police for example.

Matt thinks anonymity is a little unfortunate, and "an understandable second-best alternative." I tend to consider the option of ananymity to be one of the glories of the internet. It is helping to crush stultifying orthodoxies, by empowering people to state their honest opinions without regard to the need to preserve one's position of reputation in some social sphere. It's great.

But choosing not to tell people everything about oneself is not at all the same thing as lying to them or actively deceiving them. We are all anonymous to some degree. Even in our everyday face-to-face conversations, we hold back tremendous amounts of information about ourselves. I don't see why holding back one's name is any different in kind.

I have chosen to tell people my name, but never, or rarely, tell them where I work, or where I live, or details about my family, my ethnic background, my friends, my personal history or my intimate relationships. Most people who write in any forum make similar choices - they divulge some personal information and closely protect other personal information. That goes for print pundits and reporters as well as bloggers. A few people, on the other hand, are very open about extremely personal details, but don't tell us their names. Why is the former treated differently from the latter?

A lot of the opposition to anonymity comes from people who are compelled, for various reasons, to publish or speak under their own names, and who resent the freedom enjoyed by those who choose not to. They wish everyone were forced to endure the same self-imposed constraints they face. I'm sure many politicians, whose daily verbal output is 95% lies, distortions and bullshit, secretly wish they could cut loose and tell people what they really think. The same is probably true of many pundits who are constrained by the ideological expectations of their editors, colleagues and readers.

Posted by: Dan Kervick on September 18, 2006 04:47 PM

I find it fascinating that people who don't read blogs are in doubt about whether Siegel's sockpuppetry was bad. Before any of the parsing of internet identity ethics began, I instantly knew that Siegel had done something worthy of censure. Contrary to the popular (and fading) assumption that the blogosphere is everywhere rife with innuendo, its actually full of very finely filtered information. For whatever reason, mass critique or whatever, erroneous stories don't persist in this culture. It's quite beautiful, I think. Whatever the conditions are that allow this, Siegel attempted to corrupt them.

Posted by: Tim Sullivan on September 18, 2006 05:02 PM

Christ, Siegel is insufferable.

You yourself comfortably adopted a false persona when you had Sprezzatura comment about one of your critics that he “couldn’t tie Siegel’s shoelaces.” Doesn’t that show great immaturity on your part?
I am too childlike to be immature.

Is that just doublespeak?

No, I’m saying it under my own name.

Solomon isn't much better herself:

As one of the country’s most eloquent and acid-tongued cultural critics, what is it like to be so sharply criticized in public yourself?
...
Your new book, “Falling Upwards: Essays in Defense of the Imagination,” fortunately does not lack for logic or rhetoric, not to mention nuanced and witty considerations of everything from Dante to “Sex and the City.”

Pass the sickbag please.

Posted by: Ginger Yellow on September 18, 2006 05:21 PM

Good point, Ginger Yellow. Siegel and Solomon are both horribly flossy.

Posted by: Kyle on September 18, 2006 06:30 PM

Just for the record, Lee Siegel went beyond pretending to specifically lying about his identity here:

"I'm not Lee Siegel, you imbecile."

Posted by: Elton Beard on September 18, 2006 06:55 PM

Many people on political (or, say, LGBT) websites keep their identity secret because they don't want their actions to bleed into their personal lives of work lives. Those people generally stick to ONE moniker. Second, those people are intentionally AVOIDING bleeding of the two worlds, not intentionally engaging in it.

Posted by: MDtoMN on September 18, 2006 07:38 PM

I'm flabbergasted by the number of folks who try to pin down the issues at hand in Sprezzatura-gate without resorting to the definition of internet sockpuppetry, a definition that was created back in the early mists of the web era (1993) precisely to pin down the problem here.

Shorter Petey: The nature of Siegel's offense has been discussed enough to have coined a word for the offense. We can see farther if we stand on the shoulders of those who came before us.

-----

And FWIW:

- Pre-Sprezzatura-gate, I thought Siegel was an insufferable douchebag.

- I thought he definitely deserved to be terminated for the offense involved in Sprezzatura-gate.

- But if my first exposure to him had been in the NYT Sunday Magazine piece, I'd probably like him. He comes off well in the piece.

Posted by: Petey on September 18, 2006 08:11 PM

Best interview question:

"What are you talking about?"

Posted by: Patrick on September 18, 2006 08:55 PM

Good call Petey.

Siegel's sockpuppetry offense would have been just as bad if Siegel had been blogging anonymously as Sprezzatura from the start and then created a second identity called "Sprezzatura Roooolz" to defend his own posts.

This ain't hard folks.

Posted by: Sean on September 18, 2006 09:02 PM

I've often thought that if I ever started a blog I'd create a whole series of fictional commenters who would attack and abuse me in a variety of ways. Does that count as sock puppetry?

Posted by: CJColucci on September 18, 2006 10:03 PM

I don't particularly care if anybody knows that my name is David Ackerman, I just don't want anybody to google my name and get a zillion freaky blog comments.

Posted by: godoggo on September 18, 2006 11:58 PM

To me, a professional journalist for 20+ years, the issue with Siegel was that he was being dishonest on a site that he was paid to write/oversee. TNR hired him to write a blog and he was anonymously promoting himself by making it seem like there was a reader defending him, when in fact there were not.

I think the fact that he was getting a salary and was responsible to meet the standards of his employer is a key difference. There is a big difference in terms of legal/ethical responsibility between a site connected to a professional news outlet and just some guy who starts a blog for personal reasons.

I have no problem with anonymity, although it certainly makes the opinions less credible when you have no idea who is giving them.

Posted by: journalist on September 19, 2006 10:53 AM

Petey says: But if my first exposure to him had been in the NYT Sunday Magazine piece, I'd probably like him. He comes off well in the piece.

I agree, there he gives off a healthy sense of humor about it all, and himself, one that I find lacking in many of the over-earnest in the blogosphere. It puts the sockpuppetry into a new light, one where he may have been trying to chase some kinds of commenting away by mocking it with equal and opposite reaction. The latter is not usually a smart move, mho, usually counter-productive, more like giving in to a temptation, related to the "feeding a troll" problem. But he admits it here, ala "yeah I acted like one of the blog brats." I can see the reason for getting tempted--there's little more aggravating than those comments that simply bash or insult the blogger. Also mho: Yglesias gets a better general grade of commenting because he includes self-deprecatory humor now and then, which takes away the insufferably righteous impression of many bloggers, which makes him less a target for the jerks who are mostly interested in knocking people's blocks off for one reason or another. The whole tiresome problem is avoided by not always presenting oneself soooo very seriously....seems like Siegel gets that now if he didn't before.

Posted by: artappraiser on September 19, 2006 11:35 AM

"The whole tiresome problem is avoided by not always presenting oneself soooo very seriously....seems like Siegel gets that now if he didn't before."

I think he's become an appeaser of Blogofacism...

Posted by: Petey on September 19, 2006 02:46 PM

I've often thought that if I ever started a blog I'd create a whole series of fictional commenters who would attack and abuse me in a variety of ways. Does that count as sock puppetry?

Posted by: CJColucci

Yes, that would be sockpuppeting, though I guess you would have to call it fingerpuppeting in order to go beyond two hand puppets.

Seems to me that the special prejudice against sockpuppeting developed as part of blog etiquette because of the necessity for anonymity for many. It was like this: ok, you can be anonymous but you have to have the integrity of a single personality with a "nom de plume." That's to maintain the blogosphere as basically a non-fiction medium, it's not a prejudice against novelists or playwrights? If I recall, it was noticeably difficult for the famous mental patient Sybil to relate to other human beings...she already was busy with so many other conversations in her head. :-)

Posted by: artappraiser on September 19, 2006 04:12 PM

I think he's become an appeaser of Blogofacism...

Nah, I don't read that much into it, I think that's going too far. He still seems ready, willing & able to bash the blogosphere if the correct occasion appears. And I think that will be interesting because of lessons learned.

Posted by: artappraiser on September 19, 2006 04:16 PM

"Seems to me that the special prejudice against sockpuppeting developed as part of blog etiquette because of the necessity for anonymity for many. It was like this: ok, you can be anonymous but you have to have the integrity of a single personality"

Exactly. It's the only way an intellectually honest pseudononymous dialog can proceed.

"Nah, I don't read that much into it, I think that's going too far."

My intended snark obviously didn't translate onto the printed page...

Posted by: Petey on September 20, 2006 09:47 AM

I'm amazed, Matthew, that you'd think that running a sock puppet is the same thing as discussing things with a pseudonym.

Needless to say, there's a huge moral divide there, and while it's fine to be "proudly eponymous", might I suggest some consideration given to those of us who aren't.

Internet pseudonymity isn't a bug, it's a feature.

Posted by: Demosthenes on September 20, 2006 12:10 PM

Having alternate IDs is not in itself sockpuppetry, if you use them in separate discussions.

For instance, it would not be sockpuppetry to use your main ID (and your own name) for public political topics, and another ID (and pseudonym) for privacy in personally embarrassing topics like singles-dating or therapy-support newsgroups.

It becomes sockpuppetry when your IDs *interact* publicly, for instance alternate IDs posting in support of your main ID, as though they were separate people.

This latter is exactly what Lee Siegel's "sprezzatura" ID did.

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Anonymity Versus Lying

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