Participants in social media networks should utilise acts of privacy to protect their identity whilst they engage in online information sharing. This will ensure that participants in these online communities can exhibit and express various aspects of their identity without compromising their personal integrity through unsolicited information sharing.

Abstract

This paper argues for the importance of maintaining privacy whilst participating in social media networks to safeguard the integrity of one’s identity online. Facebook and Twitter identity practices are compared and discussed alongside the advantages of anonymity to enrich online community engagement. The need to distinguish between online and offline identities is considered a necessary responsibility in online profile management for safekeeping one’s privacy. Networked publics, while mediated, are not able to control the dissemination of content entirely, so it is up to the individual to put certain protections in place such as segmenting their identity, whilst participating in online communities.

Introduction

Users access the Internet to engage in social media networks and online communities through mediated personal communication devices such as mobile phones and computers (Katz et al, 2004). Participants in social media networks share personal information including thoughts, whereabouts, images and videos of themselves and their environment with friends, family, colleagues and publics. Social media networks such as Facebook, and Twitter are two popular yet different platforms for participating in online communities that enable users to socialise, express creativity and share opinions with different social groups.

Each piece of content produced across social media networks forms an accessible repository of data on the individual which can be exploited for commercial gain through profiling; or personal attack by trolling, flaming or doxing practices that risk compromising the integrity and safety of individuals. An individual has no control over how their content is used by others online, so in order to protect one’s identity, an individual needs to be scrupulous with their online profile practices by segmenting their online identity across different platforms, depending on the context of the online community group, if they wish to express more than mainstream conformity.

Discussion

‘One can expect…the birth of a monster, of a human-machine assemblage whose encounters may be feared as those of alien but who surely will be yet another incarnation of ourselves’ (Poster, 2001).

Humans live in communities. Communities practice communication in online environments and social media networks. As members of online communities, we are required to ‘sign-up’ or submit to social media networks by creating user accounts. The range of information required to generate a user account varies from establishing ‘authenticity’—using one’s real name, contact details and photo-likeness—through to offering complete anonymity and allowing the use of pseudonyms and avatars. The practices of social media networks vary from user to user and is dependent upon the cultural context in which they operate. Some online communities, such as closed groups, require authenticity to flourish; while others—such as Twitter—benefit from the protection anonymity affords its users due to the high prevalence of opinion. Individuals do not benefit socially from practices of full-disclosure under the guise of the real-name Internet popularised by Facebook, even within a closed network because of the constant moderation taking place. Pseudonyms provide a practical means to compartmentalise one’s identity when participating in online publics to avoid a tendency towards homogenised content.

Underlying the use of social media by communities is the desire for people to connect and share information and ideas. According to Feld, ‘The information shared between social ties depends on the foci and the shared facets of their identity’, (1981). In other words, networks are formed when individuals establish ‘common ground’. This implies that there is a distinction between what is common and therefore shared socially between individuals; and what is not common and therefore omitted within some social contexts. Boundaries are established by social conventions. Donath and Boyd say that ‘networks are the extension of our social world, but they also act as its boundary’ (2004). Like-minded individuals gravitate towards one another and congregate in shared spaces online, just as they do offline. The adoption of various personas in online communities is the application of privacy through implied social conventions within recognised boundaries. Being able to compartmentalise one’s identity safeguards true representation of the self without compromising one’s personal integrity.

In opposition to these safeguards, Facebook explicitly represents the camp of full-disclosure—the ‘real-name’ Internet—requiring full name, gender, birthdate, contact phone and email address together with an accurate image of the person to join. Facebook’s name policy states that ‘Facebook is a community where everyone uses the name they go by in everyday life. Always knowing who you’re connecting with helps keep you and the rest of our community safe from impersonation, scams and phishing’ (Facebook, 2019). As the world’s largest social media network, boasting 1.52 billion daily users, this is impossible to police and not the real aim of Facebook.

Sold under the guise of social responsibility, profiling user’s information simply enables more targeted advertising. Full-disclosure is also practiced across the web through ‘likes’ and sign-ins from Facebook accounts in other applications. According to Van der Nagel & Frith, this ‘ties a user’s online practices back to a singular identity’ (2015). Attributing data to a singular identity in a social network risks homogenising the multi-faceted self. As a warning to us all, Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook famously said, ‘You have one identity…The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly… Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity’ (Kirkpatrick, 2010).

This statement demonstrates a lack of humanity and a complete disregard for self-presentation and privacy. Who we are is the fullness of our multi-faceted selves constructed within the relationships of our disparate communities; be they in the physical or online sense. In contrast to Zuckerberg’s statement, Katz et al says, ‘social networks are fragmented selves, not the whole embodied self, required by a traditional community’ (2004), showing that it is important, as individuals, for the realisation of self to be able to connect online, in confidence, with like-minded individuals; free from the litany of self-moderation practices.

Our identities are forged by the multiple roles we play while we act in accordance with various situations and events determined by others. Online communities are an important extension of this—of our selves—being a space for self-expression and conversation, a place of pure consciousness, existing to enrich our social connections—irrespective of physical proximity. Donath and Boyd argue that ‘By making all of one’s connections visible to others, social media sites remove the privacy barriers that people keep between different aspects of their lives…a network can extend the range of people or limit the range who can contact us’ (2004). By protecting our privacy, anonymity and pseudonymity work to preserve these boundaries. An individual needs pseudonyms online to fully express what matters to them without repercussion. Twitter recognises this need. With more than 126 million daily active users (Zephoria, 2019), Twitter approaches the fluidity of identity more readily, as evidenced by their privacy policy: ‘Your display name and username are always public, but you can use either your real name or a pseudonym. You can also create and manage multiple Twitter accounts, for example to express different parts of your identity’ (Twitter, 2019).

Twitter is a great example of the way in which reputations are established and maintained online. Well-known political and media personalities exist in the same proximity as experts and members of the general public; all contributing to the public discourse on current affairs. The displays of identity vary depending on the affordances of the individual’s public profile—from accurate representations of high profile individuals such as Scott Ludlam, to pseudo-anonymous representations by self-proclaimed provocateurs such as CaptainGetup! and the avatars of anonymity adopted by disparate users. The currency of an individual’s reputation ‘is enhanced by contributing remarks of the type admired by the group (Donath, 1996)’. On one hand, an individual’s reputation is enhanced through their ability to post well-informed opinions as with ex-senator Scott Ludlam; while on the other, a reputation can be built on inflaming discussions and promoting conflict which is the sole purpose of Advance Australia’s mascot Captain Getup, developed for the 2019 federal election cycle.

An individual’s identity is married to their reputation. An individual’s reputation is their currency—the measure of their worth and their credibility. Donath argues that to assess the ‘reliability of information and the trustworthiness of a confidant, identity is essential. Therefore, care of one’s own identity, one’s reputation is fundamental to the formation of community.’ Gates argues that ‘People base their decisions to share information on their relationship with others’ (2007). There is a plethora of personal information shared over social networks, including photos and videos containing other people which creates a privacy risk if users’ privacy requirements are all different. Facebook cautions users that they have no control over how their content will be used by others and to consider this when sharing with their Facebook friends. According to Fogues, ‘Social context is another dimension of relationships; some relationships have different meaning depending on the context, or they only exist in a given context (2015b). The real-name internet, say Van der Nagel & Frith argue ‘can make people feel less safe and can inhibit behaviours they engage in online’ (2015a), which supports the reason why people readily adopt pseudonyms and anonymity in different contexts, especially in the public arena, outside of closed groups.

Anonymity practices, according to van der Nagel and Frith are ‘highly complex’ (2015) obscure, and can disconnect a user’s real identity from their online views. Pseudonymity marginally obscures one’s identity, while full anonymity is an avatar totally divorced from the users’ real identity. Hogan argues that pseudonymity can protect users’ security while enabling them to participate freely online without fears of ‘context collapse (2010)’. Boyd & Marwick coined the term ‘context collapse’ to describe the merging of online practices between different social groups in the real world context (2011). They argue that we segment and contextualise our social lives around different networks which rarely come together; however social media networks can artificially bring these disparate groups together around an individual who then finds themselves moderating their content to eliminate the possibility of context collapse. At worst a moderated, ‘vanilla’ version of self is presented online contextualised by social conformity and the need for privacy.

Twitter is a networked public forum used to great effect by mass media as a dissemination tool for current affairs and participation. In the public dissemination environment, content is posted at a rate of 350,000 tweets per minute (internetlivestats.com), so there needs to be levers for mechanising privacy such as the ability to operate multiple accounts; because it is not possible for the architects of the networked public to mediate content as effectively as mass communication can with top down dissemination. Danah Boyd describes mass media technologies such as television, radio and newspapers as mediating technologies which disseminate information. ‘Social media is a networked public which magnifies happenings in the unmediated public—or offline world—by intensifying the scale of the public’ (2007). The dissemination of information is not able to be controlled once it is in the possession of the networked public. Fogues et al state that ‘the most important privacy concerns of social media users are identity theft, unauthorised access, misuse of personal information, stalking and profiling’ (2015). In addition to these risks are negative forms of self-expression which don’t always hide behind anonymity practices.

Flaming, trolling and doxing are negative behaviours exhibited in social media environs. Van der Nagel & Frith describe flaming as ‘deliberately posting comments filled with profanity and personal attacks designed to unsettle participants in online communities’. Trolling involves ‘hostile language directed at participants in order to incite emotional responses’ whilst doxing, a more sinister phenomenon, involves ‘anonymous and pseudo-anonymous users researching an individual and posting identifiable facts about that person online’ (2015). These behaviours are exacerbated by the architecture of social media networks. Comments are not always moderated effectively before exponents have incited strong emotional responses in users, or in some extreme cases, incited extreme acts of violence against minorities and individuals. It is the design of the social media platform that enables these practices through the function of comment feeds and now live self-broadcasting capabilities; the shocking effects of which were seen in the mass shooting in March 2019 by an extreme right-wing terrorist in Christchurch, New Zealand. According to Donath, ‘the online world is a wholly built environment’ where ‘the design of the environment is everything’ (1996b). Put simply, the platform’s design determines whether or not you can share information in a public forum or have a private conversation.

According to Marwick and Boyd, privacy is ‘the management of boundaries’ an ‘ongoing negotiation of contexts in a networked ecosystem in which contexts regularly blur and collapse’ (2014c). Preserving privacy online is a necessity, requiring individuals to ‘have agency’— being knowledgeable of the nuances of the social media platforms they engage in; and understand privacy policy and the methods by which content is shared by others. Alan Westin describes privacy as the ‘claim of individuals, groups, or institutions to determine for themselves when, how and to what extent information about them is communicated’ (Westin, 1970). Donath similarly states that balancing privacy and accountability, reliability and self-expression, security and accessibility requires a series of compromises and trade-offs whose value is very dependent on the goals of the group and of the individuals that comprise it (1996c). Privacy online is a conscientious decision to safeguard the integrity of our identity without compromising self-expression.

Conclusion

Privacy is as much a necessity online as it is offline. Users of social media networks can’t control how their data is profiled by the platform architects, or how their content is disseminated by other users. Segmenting identity in networked publics by the application of pseudonyms and anonymous avatars is a simple, yet effective way users can manage their privacy and protect themselves from personal harm. Adopting a pseudonym online also enables individuals to perform the multi-faceted self, and explore different expressions of their identity in a supported environment. Facebook wrongfully promotes a homogenised single identity that is destructive because it opposes the way in which individuals normally conduct themselves in the offline community, leading to context collapse.

Twitter however actively supports multiple identities on its platform—recognising that multiple views promotes multiple discussions which are the very fabric of public discourse. Supporting multiplicity online within social networks embraces community diversity and enriches meaningful human connections. Online privacy is needed to maintain social context and explicit boundaries as an extension of our communities and our self-presentation. The real-name Internet by design opposes the affordance of personal protection and should not serve as a directive to moderate our behaviour. Segmenting our identity through pseudonymity within different online contexts does this already and should always be supported as a normal function of society. 

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