Image Source: Reddit.com (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)
Anonymity is difficult to achieve in today’s media driven world. Names are no longer simply matched with faces but also Twitter accounts, Linkedin resumes and of course Facebook profiles. Sites are slowly bringing together online and offline personas. The Internet giant YouTube is attempting to coax commenters into revealing their identities by connecting through Google Plus. Other online communities maintain the tradition that the Internet is the land of the anonymous.
Reddit is one such community. Ranking as the 129th most popular site on the Internet, the so called “Front Page of the Internet” is a social news website which relies on user created content. This content covers an incredibly diverse variety of topics known as subreddits. The content is created, shared and voted upon using an anonymous identity, similar to YouTube and comments sections found on many news organizations websites. This anonymous environment can create a veil of protection for hateful sexist, racist or homophobic comments. Anyone who has watched a video on YouTube knows what hate can be expressed in a anonymous public forum.
Reddit goes one step farther than YouTube by encouraging communities to anonymously discuss abhorrent subreddit topics like r/misogyny and r/rapingwomen. As distasteful as these are the recent uproar about Internet privacy is centered on another subreddit, r/CreepShots. CreepShots is based around taking pictures of unsuspecting women in public and posting their pictures on the forum where reddit users either up vote or down vote their appearance while making comments. The pictures are often focused on private or genital regions and never have the permission of the woman. Reddit defends these photos by labeling itself as a bastion of free speech. The site fiercely defends the rights of the user to post these pictures as the majority of photos are technically legal .
Enter Reddit user “Samantha”. A 25 year old woman blogging under a pseudonym, Samantha was no stranger to CreepShots and decided to treat the Redditors to a taste of their own medicine by publicly exposing the offenders real life names and faces. On her blog Predditors, Samantha uncovers the true identities behind the accounts which post to CreepShots. She connects the dots between social media sites until she finds enough information for a blog post. Her blog only receives a tiny percentage of visits compared to the subreddit. The most poplar post on Predditors has 230 notes compared to a post on creepshots which can have thousands of upvotes. Despite these limitations, Predditors continues to publicly shame perpetrators or doxxing. The act of doxxing is revealing personal information about someone which can be found by searching the Internet. Earlier this month Gawker doxxed Reddit “violentacrez” for posting sexually explicit images of underage girls on the subreddit r/jailbait. Gawkers story went viral and the story migrated to major news outlets like BCC and CNN. The popularity of such stories reveal the backlash against offensive Internet behavior. Less and less people are willing to excuse Internet tolls and are beginning to fight back.
The majority of subreddits are nothing like creepshots. Top rated subreddits like r/funny, r/worldnews and r/gaming reflect the average users interests. The majority of Reddit is male and aged between 25 and 34. Of the sites 35 million users very few have contributed to subreddits like creepshots. However those who have been exposed by Predditors are becoming the new face of the social network. CreepShots has been closed down due to Samantha’s efforts. She is continuing to “doxx” Redditors, this time exposing accounts which post pictures of underage girls.
Is r/CreepShots any different then Boston T People or People of Walmart? Do the Predditors deserve to keep their privacy or did they lose that right when they posted personal information on the Internet? Either way the gap between real life identities and anonymous online personas may be much smaller than we think.
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