There is a woman here in Sonoma County who transmits on Twitter various and sundry pieces of information and gossip (much of it presumably unconfirmed) about the local political scene. Tweeting under the name “SRPolitics,” she has chosen to conceal her true name, taking as her on-line identity a photo of John F. Kennedy, for reasons that aren’t clear to me.
My initial reaction to this was irritation. Dealing in rumors under cover of anonymity seems, at first blush, to be cowardly and unfair at best, and malevolent at worst, even though most of her posts are, for the most part, breezy and in good fun. So I was all revved up to write an obnoxious post blasting her.
But somewhere between the thought and the execution, I started thinking more seriously about the benefits that come from anonymity. I don’t know what SRPolitics does for a living, but I can imagine circumstances in which her posts might result in adverse consequences to her job-wise, particularly if she works in a government office. If that’s the case, then concealing her identity is the only way she can feel free enough to post as she does. And although I might think that SR Politics ought to reveal her identity so that her readers can better evaluate the content of what she says (does she have an axe to grind? is she secretly working for someone’s campaign?), she’s certainly under no obligation to do so; if we don’t like her hiding her identity, we can simply stop reading her posts, or read them with enormous grains of salt.
Certainly the idea of writing under an assumed “pen” name has a long and storied history. The famous “Federalist Papers” on the U.S. Constitution were originally written as 85 essays under the pseudonym “Publius.” The website “a.k.a” purports to have a list of 4,196 real authors and their 10,854 pen names. At times, writings have been published under assumed names precisely due to the fear of the author of reprisals, either personal or political (to take a relatively recent example, recall the “Baghdad Diarist” who published critical pieces in the New Republic under the assumed name “Scott Thomas”). SRPolitics is not plowing new ground.
But I suspect that one reason she Tweets under that JFK icon rather than her own picture also has to do with the Wizard of Oz effect: The man behind the curtain will almost always seem less formidable than our imagined version of him. Generally we fear the unknown, and so subconsciously ascribe to an unknown author a little more intelligence, power, and deference than we would to an actual human being. (Something similar occurs, I think, in polls matching a specific individual against a “generic” candidate — the fact that President Obama has a 44 – 42 lead on a “generic” Republican according to a recent Gallup Poll says to me that he’d soundly beat a specific person, who bring his or her own negative qualities into the race.) We should consciously discount SRPolitics Tweets because of her anonymity, but at some level our psyches won’t let us.
I considered posting my political commentary anonymously. In my position, I’m constrained in what I can say publicly, and posting under an assumed identity would allow me more freedom to say what I really think. But in the end I decided not to do that, in part because I want the constraint of knowing that people will associate what I say with the real person I am. If I am concerned about how something I post will affect those I work with, my view is that I should take that into account in what I write. That constraint makes me more careful, more reasonable, and hopefully more thoughtful. People should, in general, know the identity of a speaker for the same reason that people should know who is funding a politician’s campaign: because it gives us insight into the motives and biases of the speaker, it allows us to more accurately and completely evaluate whether there is some other agenda behind what’s being said.
In the end, I can’t say that it’s wrong for SRPolitics to choose to veil her true identity. I can only say it’s not the choice that I made.
Categories: Politics, Sonoma County