Anonymity Of The Internet And Monstrous Behaviour

The anonymity of the internet is to blame for the rise in online trolls targeting women because it has removed natural constraints on "monstrous" behaviour, a leading neurologist has suggested.

Baroness Susan Greenfield, a professor of pharmacology at Oxford University, said humans had evolved a "handbrake" to stop them disclosing all their thoughts in real life.
But, she argued, while the physical "constraints" of body language protect them from sharing "monstrous" thoughts in real life, it no longer applies from behind a screen.
Instead, a lack of empathy from the anonymity of the internet has now led to "appalling behaviour", with keyboard warriors issuing rape threats, bomb threats, and showing the "worst side of human nature".

Earlier this month, MP Stella Creasy, campaigner Caroline Criado-Perez, classicist Professor Mary Beard, and female journalists were the subject of rape and bomb threats on Twitter, while teenager Hannah Smith is reported to have committed suicide after being bullied online.

Baroness Greenfield told an audience the computer screen had given "spiteful people" a new means of expression without normal social concerns.
She said: "Of course there's always been bullying, there's always been spiteful people.
But until the screen gave a platform and the cyberworld gave them a means of expression and an anonymity, we have always been constrained."

"What biology has done, and this is very clever, is that we have body language, we have eye contact, and voice tone, and blushing and so on.
Biology has done this because the human tendency is to self-disclose about everything all the time, as an antidote to loneliness and its good for your health.
But we need to be constrained because if you do that unconditionally to anyone, potentially they can manipulate you; they can have power."

"So what has happened is that we've developed a handbrake.
If you don't have that biological handbrake - the eye contact, the body language, the blushing, the voice tone - it gives you slowly the confidence and the proof that you can disclose to someone else."
She added: "If you let it all hang on, then I'm afraid we have the problem of the monstrous things people are saying online, when they have the anonymity of the blogosphere.
It's not that the blogosphere is making people like that; it's like Lord of the Flies. It's giving people the chance to express the worst side of human nature which is normally constrained by body language."