Does Anonymity Contribute to your Social Media Community?

I don't know who "Anonymous Member" is, but I do know that I don't want to speak with them.

"You can participate anonymously in a Facebook group if anonymous participation is available to your group."

Many Facebook group users collectively breathed a sigh of relief. There is no feeling like the anxiety that you get when posting about potentially sensitive topics in Facebook groups, yearning to benefit from the community's feedback while not being willing to open yourself up to the judgement of strangers online. But is this tradeoff worth the loss of safety features and community feel that can result from allowing anonymity in this space?

Why are Users Choosing to be Anon?

While I was preparing for my wedding, I was a part of many wedding-related Facebook groups that were overall very positive spaces online. However I do recall an incident where a groom-to-be posted in a group about his plans to propose to his girlfriend to get feedback from actual women on if it was the proper approach. Of course all of the women in the group were very moved by his commitment to making sure that his partner was comfortable and gave such helpful feedback-

We do love a man with perspective, after all!

Everything was great until one of the group members tracked down his girlfriend on Facebook and cruelly messaged her about the proposal, effectively ruining the surprise and one of the most memorable moments in many women's lives just because 1) They can, and 2) because they just happen to be a grade-A asshole.

I imagine that if this user were anonymous, this could have been avoided. After all, you have no idea who is online or what their intentions are...

Which is exactly why I find allowing this feature to be counter-productive towards forming healthy online communities through social media.

Anonymity & the 2010's

My knee-jerk reaction when reading about this update was to be immediately thrown back to the mid 2010's, when social media became an unrestricted playground for anonymous users. Everyone that I knew had an AskFM and a Formspring profile and posted them happily to their social media pages, encouraging friends and lurking classmates alike to anonymously comment on...well...everything.

Every college-aged student around this time seemed to either have the YikYak app downloaded, or have heard about the barrage of prejudiced comments and bomb threats that spread through campuses like wildfire. Every Tumblr user has stories about which anonymous hate comment was the catalyst to them turning off the ability to leave anonymous messages on the site.

For all of my young readers who were enjoying elementary school a decade ago instead of arguing with anonymous commenters online, just know that it was brutal. In fact, the reason that today's youth have likely never heard of YikYak and Formspring is largely due to the amount of chaos that these spaces caused in the social media sphere.

The only failsafe that Facebook has to prevent this new anonymous feature from becoming the modern equivalent of these anonymous question/comment mediums is the fact that group admins can see the poster's identity even when group members can not. But what happens when anonymous group members throw stones and hide their hands?

Anonymity as the Antithesis of Community

I'm currently a member of several travel-based Facebook groups, and within the past few months my timeline has been peppered with questions about immigrating abroad from "Anonymous Member." The same "Anonymous Member," you ask? Probably not. But there's no way to say for sure, and that bothers me.

"Can someone tell me what is needed for this visa?"

"Do I need to apostille my documents before or after I leave the United States?"

"I need someone to tell me how my dog can travel. Thanks!"

Now, none of these are particularly sensitive questions, and seeing them posted anonymously was both confusing and annoying for any seasoned traveler who has been forced to be resourceful enough to use the search features generously provided by both Facebook and Google. Nonetheless, I ignored them outright until one particularly clueless Anonymous Member appeared on my Facebook Group feed.

"I would like to start a business to receive this visa, but I don't know what business to start. Can you give me ideas on what business I can make?"

I sighed and put on my big sister hat. I don't make a habit out of giving life advice to strangers online, and maybe I was doing so from a place of ego, but I felt that it would be irresponsible to an extent not to.

"Starting a business is a very difficult task, and doing so abroad is even more challenging. It's also impossible for anyone to tell you what business you should start since we know nothing about you as an anonymous user."

Having no idea how this would go over, I hesitated before addressing the elephant in the room that apparently many were also itching to address.

"...I also think that people would be more receptive to this post if it wasn't anonymous, because 'I won't even tell you who I am, but give me free information' comes off as a bit entitled."

Dozens of commenters agreed that seeing so many anonymous posts with demands for mundane information really damages the community building aspect of local Facebook groups. This sparked a discussion about whether anonymity adds to the "neighborly" concept of helping others in your community through social media, and it was a very productive discussion.

My comment went over very well with everyone except for "Anonymous Member".

Not only did I receive a very lengthy and moderately unhinged reply about how shockingly, none of the group members know "Anonymous Member" well enough to judge them, but this member also wrote a very long and equally unhinged post the next day about how horrible and unfriendly "certain group members" were for their responses to the previous posts. At certain points in the post, they made it very clear that they were particularly bothered by my comment and found the amount of people who agreed with it to be unacceptable.

As someone who has had my social media pages stalked by people who are not all the way there, my first instinct was to wash my hands of this situation and just block them. There was just one problem with that -

I have no idea who to block.

As someone who has had to get lawyers involved with the actions of anonymous users towards me, my alarm bells started going off. I circle back to the group page to flag the post with an admin, but group members had already called out the user and gotten the post removed. Because of this I have no clue when or if I'm interacting with this unhinged "Anonymous Member" and have no way to avoid it.

All of my own comments are proudly assigned to "Artemis Peacocke", accompanied by that pretentious blue check that I must bear if I'm to receive even basic customer support for my clients on Meta platforms. My comments are not difficult to spot. So my response to this situation was to delete all of my comments in this group and stop participating.

This might seem like an extreme reaction, but in Facebook groups that allow anonymous posts and comments, you have no ability to quickly block a user who is causing trouble without first appealing to admins who are often volunteers and are not online 24/7. How can I feel safe enough to engage in group discussions if I have no control over who is interacting with me?

While I was freshly pondering my willingness to participate in groups that allow anonymous participation, I came across an anonymously posted photo of bloody cat diarrhea in a group that I joined related to cats with heart failure. When I requested for graphic content to be posted un-anonymously so that we could have the option to block this content, the group admin commented some variation of "all content is allowed and if you don't like it feel free to leave."

I did.

This is My Job, Actually.

As a social media manager and strategist, I have quite a few clients for whom I'm responsible for managing their online communities. Several of these online communities have thriving and intimate Facebook groups where everyone is very helpful, loves celebrating each other's wins, and recognizes top contributors who regularly add value to the group. I myself co-founded the largest outdoor recreational roller skating group in the Pacific Northwest using only social media, in which Facebook groups were a big part. This grew into a thriving real-life community of hundreds of people.

I don't think that any of these communities would be so successful if they allowed anonymous posting.

The internet is the wild-west where anyone can be anyone and say anything, and while having a name behind a post might not solve this issue (What? You think that someone would just go on the internet and use a fake name??) removing the ability to block profiles unless you go through a layer of unreliable security is a terrible idea. Even well intentioned anonymous commenters damage the "community feel" of a group by removing any kind of authenticity, and most kinds of accountability for what is said.

As a social media professional, "Anonymous Member" gives me a headache. As a social media user, "Anonymous Member" scares me.