Pseudonyms: Good, Bad, or Simply Out of Our Control?

Original Post By: Rachelle Hampton

Authour: A.S

TW: Mentions of violence against the black community and depression

I never realized the power that pseudonyms can have. With spending so much of my life stressing out about sharing too much information on the internet, posting something that would follow in 30 years, or accidentally revealing something through one of my Instagram posts that I meant to keep hidden from my parents, I didn’t think about the opposite side. How it would feel to be completely unrecognizable. While this seems like a freeing thought, it’s also frightening since people can excuse actions under the tag of being “anonymous.”

Rachelle Hampton’s article “The Black Feminists Who Saw the Alt-Right Threat Coming” inspired a mishmash of feelings about pseudonyms in my mind, from how disturbing it is that people are trying to pit black people against each other using their own cultural narratives, to the realization that social media is still trying to catch up in terms of monitoring these imposter Twitter accounts. It brings me back to that frightening feeling since after hitting that “report” button on someone using a pseudonym harmfully, what’s the guarantee that someone will believe you?

The post that began it all - this post was created by 4Chan who created the #EndFathersDay hashtag as a prank

This is an example of tweets from Twitters users who believed the account was really run by the black feminists who's names were used

Hampton’s article discusses a myriad of schemes carried out by imposter accounts such as men’s rights activists, misogynists, and even the Russian government. It explains the role of black feminists who worked together to expose the creators of a harmful #EndFathersDay hashtag. They banded together with the hashtag “YourSlipIsShowing to expose the imposter accounts taking on the guise of black feminists and posting harmful content to pit communities against each other. And even though these attempts

were proving successful, the #YourSlipIsShowing community was ignored by institutions and was forced to witness not only the birth of more hateful hashtags, but these racist accounts had in real life. Suddenly, the hashtags morphed into harassment campaigns against black feminists and groups such as the alt-right during the 2016 election. These hashtags, which seemed playful to communities that are unaffected by them, were spiraling into actions of physical harm, and some notable remarks in the article include:

These ideas led me down the winding road of whether pseudonyms are good or bad and if they will ever be able to be monitored effectively. In “Being Sad on the Internet: Ysabel Gerrard on What Young People Do Online,” Gerrard emphasizes that pseudonyms offer a safe space for people to share their experiences with mental health and how meme accounts with posts about teachers and students are light humour. But as we have seen from Hampton’s article, these accounts can grow wildl out of control and become harmful for minority communities. Take the “Feminist” account on Instagram for example, where an article published in 202 by Cecelia Nguyen reports that account that steals work from marginalized artists and surface-level quotes about feminism while making a profit off of the whole operation. This was a scam that very few people saw through, similar to the #EndFathersDay hashtag. And if there is difficulty with monitoring these situations, as Twitter has proven, should these pages exist at all?

Some key takeaways from this analysis of pseudonyms include how important it is to analyze media critically and how different this analysis is for marginalized communities. These communities have to be hyper-aware of what people are posting online and face the brunt of hurtful threats while feeling like it is their responsibility to call the accounts out. With hashtags and pseudonyms constantly changing, Hampton has proven that marginalized communities cannot rely on an algorithm to solve their problems and how out of control a trolling hashtag can get. I feel that these comparisons open up a meaningful discussion about the use of pseudonyms since they don’t seem to be going anywhere, so we might as well learn to navigate the complex pros and cons they offer.