1)- Donath, Judith S. “Identity and deception in the virtual community.” Communities in cyberspace, 2002
2)- Bernstein, Michael S., et al. “4chan and/b: An Analysis of Anonymity and Ephemerality in a Large Online Community.” ICWSM, 2011
Summary:
After almost a decade of the rapid evolution of online social communities, the two papers discussed a continually important component when designing an online social platform which is Identity and Anonymity of users.
The first paper – although dated – discussed a phenomenon still arises in modern online social platforms which is user Identity and how it could be used to deceive others. The author used an analytical framework to approach her study, which is a communication system developed by biologists and game theorists that consists of signals (cues used to present identities), senders (person having/claiming an identity) and receivers (other members of the community).
The author classified the signals into: (1) Conventional (obvious, easy and cheaper) signals, which might deceive the community members, and (2) Assessment signals, which are harder and more costly to send, and usually used to measure the veracity of an identity
The author studied the Usenet newsgroups, and identified three major types of identities: (1) Account name (email address), (2) Identity in voice and Language and (3) Signature. She also identified different types of deception inside the Usenet newsgroup: (1) Trolls, (2) Category deception, (3) Impersonation and (4) Identity concealment. And through each type of identity and deception the author explained different examples and showed which type of signals is used and how the other community members had recognized the deception.
In the second paper the authors studied the 4chan online community with respect to the Anonymity nature of the participants and the design aspect of ephemerality of the network.
Reflections:
Lots of observations and events related to the Egyptian revolution in 2011 came into my mind when I read the first paper. During those events online social platform were used to discuss the ongoing political situation between different parties, organize protests, and even rescue protesters during that period. The following examples illustrate real situations about identity and deception during the revolution:
- Protests leaders used to conceal their real identities through creating false identities in order to protect themselves from the authorities, which used to chase and detain protesters (Identity concealment)
- Fake accounts were used to create conflicts and fights between different political parties and even between the members of a single group/party (Trolls)
- Fake identities that worn the hat of certain groups were used to hack into those groups in order to create conflicts between the same group members (Category deception)
- Fake accounts of popular participants of the revolution were used to spread false news to their followers (Impersonation)
Those cases of different types of deception create an ongoing argument whether the identity of users on online social platforms should be kept verified and reflects the real identity of the user or users could be anonymous or use fake identities.
Designing an online social platform that allows its users to freely self-express, participate in events organized through those platforms and protects their privacy while in the same time prevents trolling, identity impersonation and different types of deceptions is a challenging task.
The following question came into my mind when I read about the in-voice and language identity. Could we identify/classify users’ views/values/backgrounds from their languages and writing styles? I believe this a very challenging and interesting research question and there are some ongoing work to answer it.
Another question about identity, suppose a user who has a real identity on one of the online social platforms created several fake identities on the same platform. How distant those fake identities far from the real identity? And are there any patterns/commons between those fake identities? Could it be used to psychoanalyze the person behind them?
The second paper signifies the role of Anonymity in the growth of the 4chan community, while the first paper lists many cases to prove the importance of identity veracity in Usenet and how identity could be used to deceive others. I think the decision of Anonymity vs Identity depends on the nature of the social platform. For example, Usenet is used as question answering platform where users search for credible answers to their questions, that is why Anonymity is not suitable and may be dangerous in designing such network. On the other hand, the nature of 4chan does not require the identity of the contributors to be visible or checked. That is also why Anonymity contributed to the energy growth of 4chan.
Another question arises, does the ephemeral nature of the platform helps in creating new trends and discussions or do people keep interacting/discussing in the same topics/trends even if those trends and topics are no longer exit on the platform?