When my daughter was newly cognizant that the fig leaf was missing as she emerged from the bath, she would shriek “Don’t see me!” before slamming the door or covering up with a towel.
Such modesty is customary and appreciated in families. Not so much online, where a perplexing number of grown-ups want to be both concealed and public. In establishing false identities for social media, comments and blogs, they yell “Don’t see me” even as they vigorously solicit attention.
For Facebook, skewered when it stepped up enforcement of a rule insisting that users provide real names, this is a minor spat, with the ruffled feather boas of drag queens soothed with a policy tweak. Hundreds of accounts shut down because of dubious identities have been restored, and Facebook now says we don’t have to use our legal names to have an account — just “the authentic name” we use “in real life.” You know, our real fake names! If you don’t have a real fake name, or lack sufficient imagination, you can buy one (even order in bulk) at websites such as Fake Name Generator. As a sign of the time, this one can be seen from space, a pulsing, neon indicator of a fundamental virtue gone wildly off course.
Facebook was wrong to apologize, because the company is right to police the use of real and verifiable names. Any backtracking on a principle — even an inadvertent consequence of it — weakens the arguments for principles more generally. Moreover, indignant complaints about a product by people who get that product for free should prompt not sympathetic clucking, but rampant eye-rolling. The larger issue is: Do we want to live in a society in which authenticity is assumed, or one in which it is optional, even perversely suspect? A new form of social media called Ello is betting on the latter, trumpeting a platform similar to Facebook that, like Google+, doesn’t require user transparency.
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Defenders of the anonymity provided by a fake name or profile say it is necessary because of the dangers that public exposure brings. My friend “Betty,” for example, isn’t Betty at all. In fact, her real name doesn’t even begin with a B. But she uses a pseudonym in all online interaction, arguing that it doesn’t matter to the reader who she is. She could tunnel down that rabbit hole even further and call herself Ben, arguing that gender doesn’t matter when commenting online. Neither does sexual proclivity or occupation, nor whether one uses a selfie for an avatar or a purloined image of Yosemite Sam.
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Authenticity matters, however, and the introduction of that pesky old ethic renders Betty’s otherwise reasonable argument absurd. Values have value because they are true in disparate application. If honesty is important face-to-face, it must be important online; duplicity shouldn’t assume a righteous sheen when it changes location. The advent of creepy invasives like Spokeo and Peekyou.com at first seem to justify, even encourage, massive digital cloaking, but that’s letting bullies write the playground rules. Equally disturbing: Faint contrails of cowardice follow most concealed or altered identities.
There are, of course, instances when anonymity is legitimately required, which is why we taxpayers fund the federal Witness Security Program (18,400 served, and still counting). But unless you’re running from the Taliban or the NSA, the desire to hide behind skirts is an impulse of children, not grown-ups. Even Edward Snowden shows his face, if only on the cover of Wired.
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In its struggle to keep its 1.3 billion user pages more authentic than Coach purses hawked in dim alleys, Facebook endures unnecessary heat, and its oft-maligned CEO Mark Zuckerberg emerges, bewilderingly, as a nascent moral leader. Character, it is said, is what you do when no one is watching. Courage is what you do when everybody is. If you don’t want anyone to see you, stay off the Internet.
Jennifer Graham writes regularly for the Globe. Follow her on Twitter @grahamtoday.