Online trolls don’t need the veil of anonymity

If you think trolling and hate speech happen as anonymous posts, think again. In fact, this commonly held belief is the exact opposite of what researchers at the University of Zurich found in their study of virtual witch-hunting in digital space. The study that evaluated more than 500,000 social-political comments from around 1,600 online petitions from the German platform between 2010 and 2013 found that non-anonymous online trolls are increasingly becoming the rule rather than the exception.

Researchers found that individuals posting hate speech who were using their full name were even more common than anonymous trolls. “As a means of facilitating a civilized digital culture of debate, there are often calls to scrap online anonymity,” said sociology doctoral student Lea Stahel.

“The opinion prevails that anonymity disinhibits people from committing obviously deviant actions because they can dispense with their own responsibility and are protected from direct consequences,” she added.

The study published in the journal PLoS ONE says that the reason behind this is that many online trolls simply don’t consider it necessary to remain anonymous as giving up their anonymity make them more credible and popular. Besides, online trolls assume that they would scarcely ever be held accountable for their aggression.

According to Stahel, it is considered very unlikely that a busy politician or a struggling company would pick precisely that person to sue when overwhelmed with a whole flood of insults. Trolls can also convince and mobilize other people in their social networks more easily if they appear using their real name, according to the researcher.

This also points to the willingness to take a risk in order to state their opinion publicly, thus gaining extra trust. Ideally, this can raise their social status because they move in digital networks like Facebook in “Friend Groups” where their comments resonate thanks to “Shares” and “Likes”.