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Anonymity and Democracy: Absence as Presence in the Public 

Sphere

Asenbaum, H.

 

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1

ANONYMITY AND DEMOCRACY: ABSENCE AS PRESENCE IN 

THE PUBLIC SPHERE

I need to become anonymous. In order to be present.

The more I am anonymous, the more I am present. 

Tiqqun, 2008

INTRODUCTION

Anonymity is an essential feature of liberal democracies around the world. 

The secret ballot constitutes the central legitimation mechanism. Anonymity is 

also crucial in a wide array of modes of political participation ranging from 

campaign funding to textual political debates in newspapers, manifestos, 

pamphlets, and graffiti. Additionally, the importance of anonymity in political 

participation increases as the mask becomes a focal point for social 

movements like Anonymous, the Black Bloc, the Zapatistas, and the Pussy 

Riot movement. This trend is amplified in the digital era, where anonymous 

expression in online newspaper forums and in activism via social media 

becomes an everyday practice (Asenbaum 2017). Given the crucial role of 

anonymity in the practices of democracy, its lack of conceptual grounding in 

democratic theory is surprising (cf. Gardner 2011, 939).

In contrast to the absence of anonymity in democratic theory (with Moore 

2017 being a recent exception), there is a plethora of diverse, empirically 

driven literature discussing anonymity in various forms of political 

participation. This literature, however, suffers from a lack of theoretical 



2

attention to its main subject of research. Eric Barendt’s book Anonymous 

Speech (2016), for example, discusses anonymity in various forms of political 

participation but fails to provide a definition of anonymity. The meager traces 

of definitions that are found in the literature on anonymity in political 

participation suffer first from a lack of acknowledgment of the complexity of 

the phenomenon. Many scholars treat anonymity as a simple and self-

explanatory concept. For example, Jonker and Pieters (2010) state: 

“Intuitively, anonymity means that it is impossible to determine who sent 

which message to whom” (216). Secondly, and more importantly, anonymity 

is often equated with privacy. Akdeniz’ (2002) only definition of anonymity, 

for example, consists of the sentence: “As a concept anonymity is closely 

related to free speech and privacy” (224). These two interrelated 

shortcomings—the oversimplified definition of anonymity as privacy—result 

in a lack of theoretical attention to the complexity of anonymity in democracy.

This essay will develop a deeper understanding and a clear definition of 

anonymity rooted in democratic theory. I contend that the problem with the 

common notion of anonymity consists in its sole focus on identity negation. 

This perspective results in an understanding of anonymity as privacy and thus 

as absence. It implicitly conceptualizes anonymity as negative freedom: the 

freedom from detection and interference by malevolent actors in society. 

Anonymity, however, consist as much of identity creation as it consists of 

identity negation. It entails both negative and positive freedoms. It facilitates 



3

expression and thus presence in the public sphere. Therefore, I define 

anonymity as follows:

Anonymity is a context-dependent identity performance expressing 

private sentiments in the public sphere by negating some aspects 

of the legally identified and/or physically embodied persona.

Both negating and creating identity has inherently liberating effects. Identity 

negation indeed affords negative freedoms, protecting the democratic subject 

from interference of powerful actors and peer pressure. Anonymity shares this 

feature with privacy. The combination of identity negation with identity 

creation, however, bestows the democratic subject with an array of positive 

freedoms to act (Berlin 1969 [1958]; cf. Fromm 1941). These freedoms are 

not always democratic. Berlin (1969 [1958]) explained in his elaboration on 

positive and negative freedoms: “[T]he liberty of some must depend on the 

restraint of others” (124). And the Brazilian philosopher Paulo Freire (2005 

[1970]) described the fear of elites in societies marked by class, race, and 

gender inequality as the fear “of losing the ‘freedom’ to oppress” (46). Thus, 

the subjective freedoms of some can result in oppression of others. While on 

one hand anonymity contributes to a sphere of equals sincerely expressing 

their diverse ideas, on the other it allows for discrimination, hate speech, and 

lying. The contradictory character of the core elements of anonymity—

identity negation and creation—results in three sets of contradictory freedoms, 

with each set consisting of one element conducive to and the other 



4

undermining democracy: (a) inclusion and exclusion, (b) subversion and 

submission, and (c) honesty and deception.

To develop this concept of anonymity and its affordances, I pursue two 

strategies. First, I review etymologies and conceptualizations of anonymity 

and their relation to privacy in various academic disciplines outside political 

science. Both their advancements and shortcomings provide inspiration for the 

definition of anonymity rooted in democratic theory developed here. Second, 

the article turns to anonymity in political participation. It briefly describes four 

different forms of anonymous participation: voting, campaign funding, textual 

political discussions, and masked collective action. It then identifies 

anonymity’s three sets of contradictory freedoms, offering illustrations from 

the empirical literature on political participation. Building on these insights, I 

finally elaborate the theoretical conceptualization of anonymity in contrast to 

privacy and the workings of the three sets of contradictory freedoms in more 

depth, introducing three contextual axes affecting anonymity: (1) the 

materiality of the communicative infrastructure, (2) the positionality of the 

communicative subject within established power structures, and (3) the 

configuration of identity knowledge.

WHAT IS ANONYMITY?

The etymological development of the term “anonymity” is characterized by a 

continuous expansion of meaning. To trace this development, I bring together 

three sets of literature, moving from literature studies to computer science—



5

which each describe anonymity in a specific context—and finally to more 

general elaborations of anonymity in communication studies, sociology, and 

philosophy. The same expansionary development of meaning can be observed 

for the term privacy. The expansions of both “anonymity” and “privacy,” 

coalesce with the development of new communication technologies, resulting 

in their overlapping and partial convergence. The task undertaken here of 

developing a definition of anonymity rooted in democratic theory consists of 

disentangling anonymity and privacy.

The term “anonymous” entered the English language in the late 16th century, 

and referred to publications whose authors remained unknown. While the 

meaning of the Greek original translating to “nameless” is already quite 

confined, its meaning in English was even more narrow: “Anonymity [was] 

defined broadly as the absence of reference to the legal name of the writer on 

the title page” (Griffin 1999, 882; also cf. Kopley 2016, 2). “Anonymity” thus 

did not refer to any kind of unidentified communication, but solely to 

nameless textual publications (Ferry 2002). The practice of anonymous 

publishing was common even before this time. It was only then, however, that 

the blank spaces on pamphlets, poems, and books were replaced by the word 

“Anonymous”. The question arises as to why the blank space was not simply 

left blank but filled with the name-like “Anonymous”. This move appears to 

be a collective effort to draw attention to the author and his or her conscious 

decision to remain unidentified. In the linguistic establishment of “anonymity” 



6

we thus find the first traces of identity creation rather than solely identity 

negation, which, as I will argue later, is the core element of anonymity.

Current conceptualizations of anonymity in computer science and technology 

studies illustrate the significant qualitative shift the term has undergone 

through the emergence of digital communication. The nameless author now 

becomes the unidentified communicator. The recipient of a message perceives 

“all subjects in the anonymity set as equally probable of being the originator 

of a message” (Díaz et al. 2003, 57). This literature acknowledges the 

complexities of anonymity as part of a communicative process exceeding 

textual publication. Moreover, it insists on the scalability of anonymity. 

Anonymity is not a state that is present or not, but a matter of degree to be 

measured on a scale between two opposing poles: anonymity and identity. To 

acknowledge the different degrees of anonymity, this literature introduces not 

only quantitative measures, but different types of anonymity, specifically 

insisting on its demarcation from “pseudonymity”: the use of pseudonyms in 

contrast with communication without any identifier (Pfitzmann and Hansen 

2010).

This qualitative shift of anonymity’s meaning expressed in quite technical 

terms in computer science and technology studies is also recognized in 

communications studies, sociology, and philosophy. Exceeding definitions of 

anonymity in literary publications and online communication, authors such as 

Helen Nissenbaum and Craig Scott generate more complex understandings of 



7

anonymity as a social phenomenon both online and offline. Scott (1998) 

defines anonymity as “the degree to which a communicator perceives the 

message source is unknown and unspecified,” (387) thus drawing attention to 

subjectivity: Anonymity is not an objective state but defined by the perception 

of communicators. Marx (1999), Wallace (1999), and Nissenbaum (1999) all 

draw attention to the plethora of identity markers that define a person. While 

for anonymous textual publishing, the name was the sole identifier, in today’s 

information age and for an increasingly complex understanding of anonymity 

factors such as location (address), social security numbers, looks, social 

categories (race, class, gender), profession, family members, etc. are a set of 

highly diverse identifiers that constitute a person. Accordingly, anonymity is 

defined as the non-identifiability of one or several of these traits (Marx 1999) 

or, as Wallace (1999) describes it, “the noncoordinability of traits” (24). 

Nissenbaum (1999), finally, explains anonymity as unreachability: 

“Deepening our understanding of the issue of anonymity in an information 

age… requires an appreciation of what it takes to be ‘unreachable’ or ‘out of 

grasp’ in a world where technologies of knowledge and information are 

increasingly efficacious at reaching, grasping, and identifying” (143).

But if anonymity means unreachability, how, then, is it different from privacy, 

which can be broadly understood as an individually defined personal sphere 

protected from alien intrusion? In the information age, the meanings of 

anonymity as one’s personal identity being undetectable in a communicative 



8

network and privacy as personal information being undetectable in a 

communicative network become virtually undistinguishable. The term 

“privacy” has undergone an expansion similar to that of anonymity (cf. Westin 

1984). Its original meaning in the work of Ancient philosophers such as 

Aristotle and Plato referred to private property as personal control over objects 

(Papacharissi 2010, 27). In its modern sense, the term privacy was first used 

by Warren and Brandeis in 1890 as “the right to be let alone.” When 

newspapers—at the time of the spread of the printing press in Europe and the 

US—started publishing details about the lives of public persons, this was 

perceived as an intrusion into their personal affairs. This notion of privacy 

thus constitutes a sphere that is shielded from external intervention. Privacy in 

this version has not lost its original meaning of ownership, as the private 

sphere is characterized by its control by the individual subject (Reiman 1976). 

It relies on a physical demarcation of space, distinguishing private locations 

(home) and public locations (cafés, squares). It is this demarcation of private 

and public space in the context of patriarchal modes of domination that has 

been aptly criticized by feminist scholars (Cohen 1992; Wagner 2015). 

This physical geography is upset by new forms of communication. Zizi 

Papacharissi (2010) goes so far as to describe the public/private dichotomy as 

collapsing as new online spaces are both “privately public and publicly 

private” (142). Public digital communication relies on private websites, with 

participants located in private homes being “alone, but not lonely” (132). To 



9

grasp this new hybridity, Nissenbaum (1997; 2010) develops the concept of 

“privacy in public.” The individual’s control over who has access to personal 

information is compromised by government surveillance and commercial data 

mining. This new understanding of privacy still contains original elements of 

personal control and the demarcation of a sphere to be left alone. It is 

uprooted, however, by the physical dislocation of this sphere. Privacy 

becomes mobile.

This brief review explains why and how the terms anonymity and privacy 

overlap. Their parallel expansion in meaning has peaked following their 

digitization, resulting in overlapping and blurring understandings. Looking at 

the conceptualizations of anonymity above, a new understanding of anonymity 

must not only overcome this amalgamation, it has several other challenges to 

face. Current discussions successfully deepen the understanding of anonymity 

by explaining it as subjective, a matter of degree, depending on various 

identifiers, and resulting in several types of anonymity. 

However, these definitions suffer first from heir conceptualization of 

anonymity as mere identity negation, neglecting the possibilities of identity 

creation. This is observable in relation to terms such as unidentifiability, 

unknowability, undetectability, unreachability, and noncoordinability. These 

terms explain anonymity as the impossibility of the identification of 

communicators by the audience, rather than as action by communicators 

themselves. The sole focus on identity negation is also evident when 



10

anonymity is defined as the opposite of identity. Second, this is also another 

reason why anonymity and privacy appear so closely related. When anonymity 

is conceptualized as concealing identity and privacy as restricting access to 

personal information, they are hardly distinguishable. Third, the terms 

employed to describe anonymity do not coincidently share the suffix -ity, 

which indicates that they are conceptualized as state rather than as process. 

And fourth, the differentiation of types of anonymity is helpful to a certain 

extent. But terms like pseudonymity, physical anonymity, discursive 

anonymity, offline anonymity, online anonymity, self-anonymity, other-

anonymity (Scott 1999), agent anonymity, recipient anonymity, and process 

anonymity (Wallace 1999) can lead to confusion and over-complexity. A new 

definition of anonymity must provide clarity and, at the same time, encompass 

these various subtypes of anonymity. 

I generate this new definition of anonymity by drawing on two concepts 

rooted in democratic theory: the public sphere and positive liberties. First, 

current understandings of anonymity as closely related to privacy emerge from 

the position of concern over the infringement of civil rights. The alignment 

with privacy results in defensiveness. In contrast, I suggest drawing on 

democratic theory’s rich accounts of the public sphere (Fraser 1990, Habermas 

1992 [1962]). Anonymity is inherently communicative. It is not primarily a 

matter of hiding, but of showing, exchanging opinions, and creating identities. 

Second, the inherently liberating effects of anonymity as unidentifiability have 



11

been conceptualized as negative freedoms, freedoms to be protected from 

external intrusion. Again, the overlap with privacy becomes apparent. 

However, I suggest that we also need to take positive freedoms, as freedoms to 

act, into account. Thus, while privacy is closely related to negative freedoms 

protecting from intrusion, anonymity relates to positive freedoms of 

expression and identity creation. 

Since the original conceptualization of negative and positive freedoms by 

Erich Fromm (1941) and later Isaiah Berlin (1969 [1958]), critics have 

contended that the two cannot be easily demarcated, since every freedom 

contains both positive and negative aspects (Blau 2004; MacCallum 1967). I 

agree with and build on this critique by drawing attention to the positive 

freedoms of anonymity that add to its negative freedoms of concealment and 

protection. Thus, while anonymity in current debates is conceptualized as the 

impossibility of interlocutors to identify the subject, I define anonymity as the 

self-expression of the democratic subject. Anonymity is not the opposite of 

identity, it is a pre-condition for creating identity drawing on both positive and 

negative freedoms. I therefore define anonymity as follows:

Anonymity is a context-dependent identity performance expressing 

private sentiments in the public sphere by negating some aspects 

of the legally identified and/or physically embodied persona.

In contrast with previous definitions, it gives priority to the creative and 

constructive aspects of anonymity, while not neglecting its concealing and 



12

negating aspects. Moreover, it defines it as a public, communicative process, 

rather than a private state, stressing its discursive and agentic nature. And 

finally, it is broad enough to encompass various subtypes, both providing 

unity and allowing for differentiations. The following sections will investigate 

the workings of anonymity in various forms of political participation and 

illustrate how its positive freedoms facilitate both democratic and anti-

democratic action.  

ANONYMITY IN DIFFERENT MODES OF POLITICAL 

PARTICIPATION

Anonymity plays a key role in different modes of political participation. In 

what follows, I briefly outline anonymous (a) voting, (b) campaign funding, 

(c) textual political discussions, and (d) masked collective action.

Voting as the central mode of political participation in representative 

democracies is in its current practice strongly linked to the notion of 

anonymity. However, the correlation of anonymity and voting is relatively 

recent. Open voting either by voice, raising of hands or on a visually 

identifiable ballot provided by different parties in different colors was the 

common practice in the US for more than 100 years from its founding in 1789. 

Under these circumstances, political parties heavily influenced citizens’ voting 

behavior either by threat or patronage. This was the reasoning behind 

introducing the secret ballot in the US and UK in the late 19th century (Barendt 

2016, 156ff; Gardner 2011, 942; Hunter 2002). The opposite legal trend to 



13

voting procedures, from anonymity to public identification, took place in the 

case of private campaign contributions. In the late 20th century, the mandatory 

disclosure of financial contributions exceeding a certain amount to candidates 

and political parties was introduced in the US (Gardner 2011, 944). 

Nevertheless, anonymity is still in place in most countries for donations below 

a certain amount.

Anonymity in textual political discussions has been addressed empirically in 

at least three forms: the publication of political texts, graffiti, and online 

communication. First, Smith Ekstrand and Imfeld Jeyaram (2011) extensively 

elaborate on the role of anonymity in the political controversy between 

Federalists and Anti-Federalists in the debate of the US Constitution in 1787. 

The use of pseudonyms was essential in this debate and built on a long 

European tradition of anonymous publication. Second, anonymity is a core 

feature of graffiti in public bathrooms as examined at one US and one 

Australian university campus (Butler 2006; Rodriguez and Clair 1999). Far 

from just scribbling slogans or jokes, graffiti appear as extensive dialogues 

between students who negotiate their gender, sexuality, race, and political 

views. Third, the medium of bathroom walls is surprisingly comparable to 

online forums. Participants post messages and check back some time later to 

see if someone responded. With the advent of the Internet, textual anonymous 

discussions have become more prevalent, with increasing publication speed 

and reach and reduced costs (Akdeniz 2002; Gardner 2011, 945; Leitner 2015; 



14

Woo 2006). While asynchronous posts in online forums are reminiscent of 

anonymous political writings from the 18th century and bathroom wall graffiti, 

real-time chats make political writing more akin to live discussions. 

Another strand of literature investigates masked collective action used by both 

pro- and anti-democratic social movements and civil society organizations. 

Pro-democratic movements use masking to turn demonstrations into street 

parties with clownesque performances, street theatre, and carnivalesque tactics 

of disguise (Bruner 2005; Morris 2012; Ruiz 2013; Spiegel 2015). An 

example of such a carnivalesque guerilla performance can be found in the 

Russian feminist collective Pussy Riot who performed their “Punk Prayer” at 

Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior in 2012. Three of the five women 

masked by colorful balaclavas were arrested and jailed. A global movement in 

solidarity with Pussy Riot re-enacted the mockery of authority with the 

colorful balaclavas as their symbol. This form of political participation builds 

on carnival traditions dating back to ancient Rome. Medieval carnival was 

more political than its commercialized rendition today. The tradition of people 

taking to the streets in disguise was used to challenge authorities through 

mockery and enact a reversal of social hierarchies (Bruner 2005). Similar 

practices of masking are used in online protest by hacktivist groups like 

Anonymous. It uses anonymous online communication to attack Scientology, 

global corporations, and national governments around the world and promotes 

freedom of speech and social justice (Asenbaum 2017; Coleman 2014). The 



15

Black Lives Matter movement uses the guise of hoods to enact solidarity with 

victims of hate crimes and police brutality who are criminalized because of 

wearing hoodies. The “Million Hoodie March” can be read as a proud 

reclaiming of a marginalized race/class identity (Kinney 2016; Nguyen 2015). 

On the other hand, the Ku Klux Klan, as an example of an anti-democratic 

movement, uses anonymity to enact white racial homogeneity through 

uniform white hoods and racist acts of intimidation and murder. Emerging in 

1865 in the US South, it fast became the largest and most influential white 

supremacist movement (Blee and McDowell 1999). This example also 

illustrates that anonymous hate crimes predate the Internet. The connectivity 

and reach of the KKK is, however, amplified today by the use of online 

communication (Schmitz 2016).

While anonymous voting, campaign funding, textual political discussions, and 

masked collective action appear as quite distinct forms of political 

participation, the discussion of the freedoms afforded by anonymity in the 

following section reveals surprising similarities. 

ANONYMITY’S CONTRADICTORY FREEDOMS

The starting point for developing a more complex understanding of anonymity 

beyond a mere equation with privacy, is the observation that anonymity does 

not only facilitate identity negation but also affords identity creation. 

Sociologists like Erving Goffman (1956) pointed out decades ago that new 



16

identities are constructed on the foundation of the hidden identity. The mask—

be it physical or virtual—serves both identity negation and creation.

In the literature on anonymous political participation, identity negation is 

framed in terms of freedom of speech. Concealing identity appears necessary 

in the face of various repressive forces in society. Anonymity appears as 

negative freedom—as a means of becoming invisible and avoiding detection. 

Regarding online communication, Akdeniz (2002) argues: “Apart from 

facilitating freedom of expression, anonymity enables users to prevent 

surveillance and monitoring of their activities on the Internet from commercial 

companies and from the government” (233). Identity negation does, however, 

not only protect from interference of state and economic actors but also from 

peer pressure by family, friends, and colleagues. According to Barendt, the 

secret ballot was introduced in the late 19th century in the US and UK not only 

to protect workers from their employers; the voting booth also proved 

especially important to women gaining suffrage in the early- and mid-20th 

century as it shielded from the influence of husbands and fathers (Barendt 

2016, 156ff).

Identity negation, be it through voting booths, computer screens, or masks, 

results in the emergence of new imaginaries and alternative personae. Ruiz 

(2013) claims: “[T]he mask does not negate identity; instead it signifies the 

possibility of a multiplicity of identities… It suggests a way of thinking about 

blankness as a means not only of erasing difference but also as a means of 



17

articulating difference” (275). Employing anonymity bestows democratic 

subjects with the ability to reinvent their appearance and thus influence their 

perception by others, be it through wearing a mask, designing an avatar, or 

creating a pseudonym. The literature on masked collective action interprets 

playful experimentation with a diversity of identities as having liberating 

effects. The democratic subject is temporarily relieved from the constraints of 

the one and only identity in the public sphere, which is subject to governance 

surveillance and commercial targeting. Mikhail Bakhtin (1996 [1968]), a 

prominent scholar on the carnivalesque, wrote: “The mask is connected with 

the joy of change and reincarnation, with gay relativity and merry negation of 

uniformity and similarity; it rejects conformity to oneself” (39, emphasis 

added). 

Based on this core contradiction of identity negation and creation as 

anonymity’s founding elements, three sets of contradictory freedoms emerge, 

each consisting of one democratic and one anti-democratic element. 

Anonymity in democracy serves (a) inclusion and exclusion, (b) subversion 

and submission, and (c) honesty and deception.

Inclusion and Exclusion

Nowhere does the contradictory character of anonymity become so apparent 

as in the discussion of inclusion and exclusion. On the one hand, anonymity 

appears to level the playing field by stripping away hierarchizing identity 

markers, generating a more inclusive participatory space. On the other hand, 



18

anonymity’s disinhibition effect (Suler 2004) contributes to attacks on 

marginalized social groups in an attempt to exclude those deemed inferior.

Inclusion. The common argument for the equalizing effect of anonymity claims 

that social hierarchies are suspended—or at least their effects are mitigated—

by concealing visible markers of gender, race, socio-economic status, age, and 

so on, thus contributing to inclusion. In the words of Leitner (2015), for 

example: “[C]yberspace represents a sphere of existence free from (or at least 

freer from) socio-economic inequalities and social constraints. Without the ex-

ante requirement of self-identification, individuals can equally share in the 

personal freedom to choose how to express themselves, including whether and 

how to self-identify” (167).

While unequal power relations are not simply suspended on the Internet, 

anonymity appears at times to contribute to more equal relations. Similarly, 

among participants of bathroom graffiti, anonymity structurally impedes 

discrimination along visual identity markers. While identity clues might persist 

in writing, physically embodied signifiers of social status are suspended: 

“[G]raffiti level the playing field by getting past all of the factors—such as 

social status, hierarchical position, education, access, familiarity with rules, 

expertise, communication competence—that advantageously privilege and 

benefit certain members against others” (Rodriguez and Clair 1999, 2). The 

same argument is made by activists in the Pussy Riot movement. After their 

arrests the media revealed personal details about band members and stylized 



19

them as celebrities. In contrast, anonymous Pussy Riot members claim: “We are 

anonymous because we act against any personality cult, against hierarchies 

implied by appearance, age and other visible social attributes. We cover our 

heads because we oppose the very idea of using female faces as trademark for 

promoting any sort of goods or services” (cited in Groeneveld 2015, 10).

These equalizing effects of anonymity result in meritocracy. While in non-

anonymous settings identity markers indicating the status of the speaker 

influence the perception of what is said, anonymous communication can only 

be judged by the value of its content. A participant of bathroom graffiti 

explains: “I like toilet walls because there’s no identity. Because if you knew 

who wrote it, you could think ‘oh, I don’t like that person, I’m not going to 

respond well to what they said’, but if you don’t know who wrote it, you’re 

going to respond with whatever you think is the best response” (cited in Butler 

2006, 23). This argument is curiously echoed in the US constitutional debate: 

Melancton Smith, writing under the pseudonym Plebeian, claimed that 

arguments should be judged “on their own merits. If it be good, it stands not in 

need of great men’s names to support it. If it be bad, their names ought not to 

sanction it” (cited in Smith Ekstrand and Imfeld Jeyaram 2011, 46). 

The principle of meritocracy is also at the center of both the ideology and 

practices of Anonymous. The hacktivist collective originated on the image 

board 4chan and its sub-board /b/, where mostly young North Americans share 

and discuss digital images with complete anonymity. “With no method of 



20

individual identity verification, /b/ becomes a community made up of non-

persistent individual identities. When you post on /b/, nobody can prejudge 

you based on your looks, age, wealth, status, or style. They only have your 

words” (Wesch et al. 2012, 92f). The ephemerality of the site, with every post 

expiring as new posts appear, can be interpreted in terms of a critique of 

digital archiving and monitoring. McDonald (2015, 979) sees 4chan and 

Anonymous as antitheses to the Facebook culture of naming, liking, and 

tagging, which connects value to the persona and not the content, and creates 

an archive easily abused for surveillance (cf. Cambre 2014, 305). This leads 

Halpin (2012) to interpret Anonymous as an anti-capitalist project: 

“Anonymous […] is an ontological shift on the terrain of identity at the very 

moment that identity has become the highest form of selection and 

exploitation in cognitive capitalism, the first glimpse of life without identity 

on the Internet” (19). 

The notion of anonymity as destabilizing capitalist hierarchies by countering 

personality cult also resonates in the literature on masked protest (Morris 

2012, 110; Ruiz 2013, 270). Social movements are framed in opposition to 

capitalist inequality as a place of horizontality, reciprocity, and solidarity. The 

movement itself appears as democratic utopia. This inclusive agenda is 

expressed in frames like the slogans of the Occupy movement “We are the 

99%”, Anonymous “We are Anonymous We are legion”, the Mexican 

Zapatistas “We are you”, the Pussy Riot movement “We are all Pussy Riot”, 



21

and the Black Lives Matter movement “We are all Trayvon Martin”. All these 

slogans start with self-definitions rather than political claims. The 

identification “We are” is then followed by a broad, inclusive term. The “We” 

is constructed as inclusive space for (almost) everyone. Thus, not only the 

negation of hierarchizing identity markers but also the creation of new 

collective identities can lead to inclusion. Ruiz (2013) elaborates: “[T]he mask 

creates a space that can be occupied by those who perceive themselves to be 

excluded and that explicitly refuses to shape or filter that which could be 

heard” (274).

Exclusion. The freedom to oppress and exclude is facilitated by anonymity 

when identity negation is used to avoid accountability and discriminate against 

those whose positions are marginalized within society. These acts aim to keep 

members of marginalized groups out of social and political spaces, especially 

those with decision making capacities. 

The Ku Klux Klan represents a telling example of the exclusive potential of 

anonymity. Here, anonymity is used in an attempt to cast out members of 

certain social groups in order to form a homogenous cultural and racial unity. 

The most appalling use of anonymity can be observed in racist hate crimes and 

the murder of African Americans in the 1920s (Blee and McDowell 1999). In 

these cases, masking was used in public lynchings to avoid detection. While 

today the KKK does not engage in public executions, their ideology of white 

supremacy that is disseminated via social media shows how the Klan upholds 



22

its original ideas of racial purity (Schmitz 2016). The goal of such actions is to 

expel particular ethnic groups that are perceived as a threat to their own 

culturally cognate community.

The example of the KKK illustrates how not only identity negation, but also 

identity creation, can be used for exclusion. While members of the first KKK 

in the second half of the 19th century wore various eclectic self-made robes, 

masks, and hoods, the second KKK founded in 1915—heavily inspired by the 

movie Birth of a Nation—adopted the uniform white robes with conical hats 

still worn by its third generation today. These ghost-like figures are meant to 

intimidate their victims. Moreover, Schmitz’ study of the KKK’s ideology, as 

expressed on its various webpages, shows that racism toward non-members is 

not the only line of discrimination. Rather, websites also contain misogynist 

and heteronormative content. Most pages exclusively display Klansmen, often 

in military attire and combat, while women are underrepresented and depicted 

as housewives (Schmitz 2016, 208ff). The anonymity of the hood eradicating 

gender differences in a universalizing move enacts KKK members as default 

men, which deters women from participating in the Klan.

Anonymity’s affordance of exclusion does not always take the form of blatant 

discrimination. It can take more subtle forms, when social and economic elites 

use their financial power to gain exclusive access to decision-making spaces. 

When economic actors influence the legislative process directly through 

lobbying and corruption and indirectly through campaign and party funding, 



23

they effectively buy access to an exclusive space. The doors to the public are 

shut. Where there are no transparency laws in place requiring the 

identification of donors, anonymous financial contributions establish secret 

connections between the donor and the candidate or party. The donor is known 

to the beneficiary; however, he or she is unknown to the public. While in clear 

cases of corruption the donation is tied to explicit political demands, in less 

explicit cases the beneficiary might act in the interest of the donor in 

expectation of future advantages. Such concerns were raised in 1997 when the 

British Labor Government proposed to exempt motor racing from a ban on 

tobacco advertising shortly after the Labor Party received a £1 million 

donation from business magnate and Formula One chief executive, Bernie 

Ecclestone (Barendt 2016, 163ff). Thus, anonymous party financing can 

distort legislative processes, which translates economic inequality into 

political exclusion. 

Another example of more subtle forms of exclusion afforded by anonymity 

can be found in the practice of voice vote in the US Congress. While the roll 

call voting record, which identifies the voting behavior of each Congress 

member individually, has established itself as the dominant practice in modern 

congressional procedures, the default version still practiced today is the voice 

vote. Here yeas and nays are each expressed verbally and collectively so that 

the individual vote of the respective Congress member remains unknown to 

the public. The chair then gauges the majority and decides the vote. This 



24

procedure, which is the original practice of the US Congress, undermines 

transparency and parliamentary accountability. Obscuring voting behavior 

effectively shuts the public out and metaphorically speaking closes the doors 

of parliament to public scrutiny. Lynch and Madonna (2103) find that 

elections incentivize Congress members to request a recorded roll call vote. 

Thus, while the competition for seats enhances transparency, voice voting is 

still a common practice when members of Congress want to conceal their 

voting behavior on controversial issues.

Subversion and Submission

By allowing dissidents and marginalized groups to avoid detection (identity 

negation) and to form new collective identities (identity creation), anonymity 

facilitates the contestation of hegemonic power structures. Simultaneously, 

however, anonymity can be used to submit subversive subjects and those at 

the bottom of power structures when it is used to discipline and maintain 

established inequalities. Anonymity thus facilitates both subversion and 

submission.

Subversion. Some of the most influential texts contesting political power 

relations that are today clearly attributed to certain authors were originally 

published anonymously, such as Thomas Paine’s Common Sense attacking the 

English government published in 1776 by “an Englishman.” The Communist 

Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels calling for a proletarian 

revolution was published anonymously in 1848 and only attributed to its 



25

authors in 1872.

The importance of anonymity for subversion has not decreased since. Morris 

(2012) argues that neoliberal developments of commodification and 

surveillance create a political context in which anonymity becomes an 

empowering tool: “Anonymity is not only a politically-motivated response to 

the encroachments of data-gathering devices and the bioinformatics that 

underwrite the impersonal efficiency of contemporary biopolitical control 

societies. It is also an aesthetic revolt against the era of navel-gazing 

narcissism that has hypnotized the subject of these regimes… A form of 

resistance to the State, then, is to eliminate its access to its economic subjects 

by scrambling the informatics networks it uses to delineate, organize and 

manage them, effectively de-activating oneself as a political subject” (110). 

Whistleblowing, for example, is a subversive practices, where individuals 

“leak” information on illegal or immoral actions from an insider perspective 

(Barendt 2016, 75). This contests capitalist logics of privatization and 

commodification of knowledge. WikiLeaks—as prominent example—

provides a website for the anonymous publication of information on US 

governmental wrongdoings. In 2010, Bradley/Chelsea Manning, a soldier in 

gender transition, leaked the greatest amount of classified military and 

diplomatic documents to the public in US history via WikiLeaks and other 

channels exposing human rights violations like the purposeful killing of 

civilians by the US-military in Iraq and Afghanistan. The story of WikiLeaks 



26

appears at the center of a global cultural rupture of identity reconfigurations. 

The anonymity of its whistleblowing practices contrasts dramatically with the 

celebrity status of Julian Assange, its public face overshadowing the drama of 

Manning, a young person searching for a new identity between army barracks 

and prison walls. 

WikiLeaks is part of a broader “freedom of information movement” (Beyer 

2014; McCarthy 2015), evolving from the hacker counter culture that upholds 

the principle of free speech and open source. Political groups like the Pirate 

Party derive their name from the notion of online piracy, consisting of stealing 

and publically sharing digital private property. Anonymous is another actor in 

the freedom of information movement that engages in the practices of hacking 

and leaking. It is most notoriously known for its Distributed Denial of Service 

Attacks (DDoS), making their opponents’ websites inaccessible. This tactic is 

often equated with analogous forms of civil disobedience like sit-ins or 

occupations. Anonymous illustrates how employing anonymity enables some 

“computer nerds” to inflict serious harm on powerful institutions like the 

Church of Scientology, Visa and MasterCard, and governments around the 

world (Asenbaum 2017). 

The mask becomes a common focal point of diverse movements contesting 

practices of identification and surveillance. What the Guy Fawkes mask is for 

Anonymous, the colorful balaclava is for the Pussy Riot movement. In 

contrast to the white faced, bearded man who is associated with the digital 



27

culture of disembodiment and Western reason, the hand-knit balaclavas in 

different colors enact physical embodiment, femininity, cultural diversity, and 

passion. This contrast between Pussy Riot and Anonymous shows how Pussy 

Riot’s performative interventions are deeply rooted in a feminist contestation 

of patriarchy. Pussy Riot’s “Punk Prayer” directly attacked Vladimir Putin’s 

government and the Russian Orthodox church, the two centers of patriarchal 

rule in Russia. The global movement in support of Pussy Riot reinterprets 

these objectives from a Western perspective as protest against state 

surveillance and police brutality. Interpreting an image of a policeman pulling 

the balaclava off a female protester’s face at a US solidarity demonstration 

with Pussy Riot, Bruce (2015) states: “In this image the balaclava circulates as 

vehicle for drawing parallels between US and Russian state repression” (54).

Not coincidentally did Pussy Riot stage their “Punk Prayer” protest in 

February—the carnival season. Medieval carnival provided a temporal chance 

to enact the inversion of social hierarchies as “the lower classes had an 

opportunity to dress up as the ruling classes and mock their power” (Spiegel 

2015, 808). Political dissidents and disenfranchised groups “used carnival 

festivities to critique government officials and state institutions and demand 

significant political reform” (Bruner 2012, 139). Bruner reports one such 

example: In 1580 Romans-sur-Isére, a small town in France, the gap between 

the rich and the poor widened as the ruling elite exempted themselves from 

paying taxes. In response, the carnival festivities organized by the common 



28

people ran under the theme “eat the rich”. The crowd in disguise held mock 

armed military parades, marched with rakes and brooms to sweep away the 

rich, and enacted selling the meat of the rich at a market. This fictive 

performance had real consequences as the mock rebel leaders were 

prosecuted, tortured, and hanged (Bruner 2005, 142). 

The parallels to Pussy Riot’s “Punk Prayer” are apparent: “Medieval carnival 

is known to have included mockery of church authorities, even swearing and 

indecent behavior from pulpits and altars” (Steinholt 2013, 123). While both 

Pussy Riot and medieval carnival encompass elements of humor, they 

combine these with serious threat. The threat “eat the rich” is echoed by the 

chorus of the Punk Prayer “Virgin Mary, chase Putin away.” The Punk Prayer 

consists of aggressive rock music and swear words. The balaclava itself, 

however colorful, contains aspects of threat: “[T]he circulatory power of the 

balaclava means that such endless reproduction can become monstrous and 

terrifying” (Bruce 2015, 49). This can also be observed in the techniques of 

the black bloc in anti-capitalist demonstrations. Hiding their faces behind 

black balaclavas, scarves, and hoods, the creation of a menacing persona is not 

an unintentional side effect as an anti-globalization protester explains: “part of 

the effectiveness of our mass mobilizations rest on this threat of implied 

violence” (cited in Ruiz 2013, 269). 

Hiding faces in hoods is also an essential practice in the Black Lives Matter 

movement. The hood affords a performance of defiance through its association 



29

with youth riots, gang wars, and anti-capitalist insurgency. In the “Million 

Hoodie March” hundreds took to the streets of New York City in hoods to 

protest the killing of Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old African American, whose 

killer, white neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman, went free. As the 

anonymity of Martin’s hood was blamed for creating a threat which justified 

Zimmerman’s actions, Black Lives Matter activists wear hoodies to perform 

solidarity with the victim and claim their race/class identity (Kinney 2016; 

Nguyen 2015). Kinney (2016) elaborates: “But even when, and sometimes 

because, authorities brand the hood as criminal or illegitimate, people keep 

wearing their hoods for resistance, revolution, and transformation. For self-

expression, defiance, and play” (71).

Submission. While anonymity promotes subversive tendencies in society 

when it is used by subaltern subjects, it can have the reverse effect when it is 

employed by those in positions of power. Anonymity can unfurl disciplinary 

power and work to maintain established hierarchies. In contrast with the 

freedom to exclude, rather than expelling the subaltern, the freedom to submit 

disciplines the subject to alter its behavior and restrict it to its subjugate 

position while keeping it within the community.

In many countries, riot police concerned with maintaining public order at 

demonstrations and protests increasingly appear masked. While these black 

masks (either in the form of balaclavas or gas masks) serve physical 

protection, they also fulfill the double function of anonymity: negating and 



30

creating identity. First, by concealing identity, police evade personal 

identification and escape public scrutiny. This goes along with trends of police 

refusing to wear their badge numbers and restricting civilians from filming 

their actions, which is most frequently observed in the context of police 

brutality against ethnic minorities (Spiegel 2015, 791f). Second, anonymity 

also allows police to construct menacing personae. Riot police uniforms are 

more akin to soldiers’ military gear evoking an image of an army at war. 

While the camouflage of military uniforms is meant to let soldiers disappear, 

black uniforms signal presence, threat, and unity. Thus, anonymity is 

employed to enhance police’s ability to remain order and discipline subversive 

subjects.

The power imbalance between anonymous police and demonstrators is 

amplified by bans on mask wearing in public gatherings. The Canadian federal 

ban on masks implemented in 2012, for example, punishes mask wearing with 

up to 10 years of imprisonment. This inverts the logic of liberal democracies 

making state actors identifiable to be held accountable by the public and 

simultaneously upholding citizens’ right to privacy. According to Spiegel 

(2015), these tendencies need to be interpreted in a wider context: “In the 

United States, cases of individuals arrested and charged for filming police 

officers multiply, while high-profile cases such as those of Chelsea Manning 

and Edward Snowden, both charged with breaching national security for 

exposing to the American people state documents concerning American 



31

government activity, further anchor the asymmetrical logic of coding and 

surveilling individuals while obscuring the actions of public forces that, in 

principle, serve and answer to these same individuals” (791f).

These tendencies cannot only be observed in physical gatherings but also in 

online communication. The Internet amplifies possibilities of surveillance: 

“[U]sers’ identities have become increasingly exposed, while the subject of 

surveillance and their activities have become less identifiable. Therefore, the 

major impetus for the power imbalance between the subject and the object of 

surveillance in the network is their differences in identifiability” (Woo 2005, 

961).

The disciplinary function of anonymity is not only used against protestors and 

insurgent minorities, but against marginalized groups more generally as 

privileged groups assert their dominance. This is the central observation in 

Rodriguez and Clair’s (1999) analysis of bathroom graffiti. While they 

acknowledge graffiti as important outlet for suppressed anger, they also 

observe that it is used by those on the top of hierarchies to affirm their 

position: “[D]ominant groups—especially white heterosexual men—use the 

open nature of graffiti to intimidate and ‘discipline’ minority groups… graffiti 

allow for open discourse (sexist, racist, and homophobic speech) that 

organizations cannot sanction, but which may also act to establish or reinforce 

the privileging aspects of patriarchal practice, thus, supporting the hegemonic 

order” (3). While anonymity’s freedom to exclude is used in the politics of 



32

extreme right-wing groups to keep those perceived as inferior out of 

communal space, submission, to the contrary, keeps them in place—in their 

subjugate position. Thus, women are excluded from decision-making spaces 

as in the example of the KKK cited above, but submitted in social spaces like 

a university campus through sexist discourses in bathroom graffiti.

A last example illustrates that submission through anonymity is not only at work 

in unequal power struggles but can also affect struggles between peers. The 

phenomenon of hate speech and “flaming”, which is discussed today mostly in 

the context of online anonymity, is expressed not only in graffiti but also was 

well known to participants in the US constitutional debate. Addressing insults 

to each other’s pseudonyms Federalists and Anti-Federalists used terms like 

“ignorant loggerhead” and “ungrateful monster” to submit their respective 

opponent (Smith Ekstrand and Imfeld Jeyaram 2011 43). “An onslaught of 

sparring and often libellous remarks appeared in newspapers and pamphlets… 

The absence of an author’s true identity, however, did not spare anonymous 

authors from attack and may have indeed made such attacks easier” (ibid. 39, 

43). 

Honesty and Deception

Lastly, accounts of anonymity in political participation describe how 

anonymous participants are more willing to reveal their true beliefs. Identity 

negation avoids peer pressure which in turn leads to more sincerity in public 

discourse. Others, however, point to anonymity’s affordance of lying as it 



33

allows for the construction of fake identities and encourages deceit through a 

lack of accountability. Anonymity thus appears to contribute to both more 

honesty and more deception in democracy.

Honesty. Oscar Wilde famously wrote: “Man is least himself when he talks in 

his own person. Give him a mask and he will tell you the truth” (Wilde 2007 

[1861]). These words were based on 19th century practices of masked balls 

and anonymously published novels that often contained strong political 

undertones (Barendt 2016, 14). The same can be observed today in all modes 

of anonymous political participation discussed here: escaping domination 

through anonymity—be it from state institutions, private actors, or peers—

contributes to a diversity of opinions in the public sphere: “There are certain 

unpopular positions which some people might want to explore, but not if they 

know they will be exposed to ridicule and perhaps even physical harm if they 

are tied to such views in public. To completely forbid anonymity would 

therefore result in no unorthodox views ever reaching the public sphere of 

debate” (Hunter 2002).

In elections, voters can uninhibitedly express their interests anonymously. 

Similarly, anonymity is used in polling to detect the electorate’s true 

preferences on various political issues (Kuran 1993, 41f). Anonymity’s 

freedom to speak the truth also plays into the freedom to subvert as 

anonymous movements challenge authority. Dissidents like Pussy Riot and 

Anonymous reveal their true beliefs when shielded by anonymity. Anonymous 



34

media are established as truth-promoting institutions such as WikiLeaks’ 

whistleblowing website or Anonymous’ independent media channel 

anonews.co that challenges the mainstream media narratives of current events 

(cf. McDonald 2015). However, honesty does not only contribute to 

subversion but also to exclusion and submission. Aggressive and derogatory 

speech directed at marginalized groups is an expression of true sentiment. 

Thus, Gardner’s two sides of anonymity might actually be seen as one and the 

same phenomenon: “[A]nonymity has been both praised for freeing citizens to 

vote and speak their true beliefs, and condemned for providing convenient 

cover to harmful or democratically undesirable behavior” (Gardner 2011, 

929). 

Both Butler (2006) and Rodriguez and Clair (1999) report in their respective 

accounts on bathroom graffiti on university campuses how these anonymous 

dialogues between students are used to verbalize political opinions that are 

deemed inappropriate in classrooms and student newspapers. Thus, the more 

formally regulated public sphere has exclusive effects: “Graffiti allow the key 

benefit of anonymity, that is, protection against any form of retribution. All 

can say whatever, however, and whenever, to whomever” (Rodriguez and 

Clair 1999, 2). Rodriguez and Clair claim that the bathroom stall functions as 

a kind of confession booth where both social identities and political views are 

expressed and negotiated. One might add the comparison to a voting booth, 

also serving the expression of true beliefs. The study of bathroom graffiti at a 



35

US university with predominantly African American students in the late 1990s 

shows how under conditions of anonymity taboo topics like homosexuality 

could be addressed. As the following dialogue shows, both sides of the 

argument—those defending and those opposing homosexuality—expressed 

their opinions in a candid and unrestricted manner: 

“(D) I really don’t understand how a woman could be attracted to another 

woman and I agree with the sister girl to the left of me. Homosexuality is very 

unnatural and since God says its wrong in the bible I don’t [think] he would 

create a human being that way. It’s a learned behavior. 

(E) You have to learn to interpret the bible. King James was a racist woman 

hater. Reading is Fundamental. You also think God is a HE. Question 

everything that contradicts your Freedom and liberty.

(A) African American women. Look! Don’t judge people. You don’t 

understand homosexuality at all! If it was a choice I wouldn’t choose it 

because of all the abuse. Why can’t I just be myself in this world?” (cited in 

Rodriguez and Clair 1999, 6ff)

This dialogue is indicative for a few reasons. Not only can the construction of 

sexual identity be observed, but we can also witness a genuine dialogue that 

most likely never would have taken place without an anonymous medium. The 

question (A) poses at the end is especially telling: “Why can’t I just be myself 

in this world?” implies that she can express her real self publicly only under 

conditions of anonymity. Both freedoms of subversion of hegemonic identity 



36

constructions and submission within a peer group resulting from frankly 

speaking one’s mind can be observed in the dialogue.

The case of bathroom graffiti illustrates that anonymity is especially important 

to marginalized social groups to publicly express their identities. The Internet 

provides another outlet to articulate queer identities. Leitner elaborates the 

situation of LGBTIQs in South Korea who often face stigmatism and social 

ostracism: “[M]any persons identifying with a homosexual (or other non-

heterosexual) identity find an anonymous Internet to be the only recourse for 

open expression… A lack of expressive opportunity deprives homosexual 

persons of reasonable opportunities to develop their identities” (Leitner 2015, 

210). In countries with more accepting cultures toward queer sexualities, 

anonymity nevertheless plays an important role. Annual Gay Pride parades are 

characterized by masquerade and carnivalesque identity performances 

enacting gender changes and fusions (Baxter 2015).

Deception. Paradoxically, while enabling a more honest discourse by 

concealing identity is an undisputed feature of anonymity, facilitating deceit 

appears just as plausible. In his notebooks from the late 15th and early 16th 

century, Leonardo da Vinci wrote: “Fire is to represent truth because it 

destroys all sophistry and lies; and the mask is for lying and falsehood which 

conceal truth” (da Vinci 2005, 684). 

While today hiding one’s identity when casting the ballot in elections is 

perceived as a core political right, the role of the secret ballot was far more 



37

contested in 19th century Britain: “[S]ecret voting was contrary to the English 

cultural traditions of honesty and openness; it would lead to habits of 

falsehood and deception” (Barendt 2016, 157). While one was supposed to 

vote in accordance with the common good, the secret ballot gave the 

opportunity for selfish voting, either concealing or even lying about one’s 

decision. Voting based on the common good was particularly important in the 

face of exclusion of certain social groups—most prominently women—from 

the suffrage. Thus, John Stuart Mill argued men had to reveal their voting 

behavior not only to a wider public, but specifically to their wives and 

daughters whose interests they were supposed to include (ibid.). 

In contrast to single voting acts, the Internet provides multiple and continuous 

opportunities for deception. The case of A Gay Girl in Damascus is a telling 

example. In the wake of the uprisings in Arab countries in 2011, the blog A 

Gay Girl in Damascus told the personal story of the Syrian LGBTIQ activist 

Amina, resisting the ultra-conservative Syrian regime from within. Amina’s 

blog posts were promoted by Lez Get Real, an US-based LGBTIQ news 

website run by Paula Brooks. After the blog rapidly rose in popularity in just a 

few months, news spread that Amina was abducted, causing her loyal 

community to spring into action under the hashtag #FreeAmina. Soon it turned 

out Amina was really Tom MacMaster, a forty-year old, white, heterosexual 

American man. Paula Brooks, who had promoted Amina’s blog through Lez 

Get Real and engaged in private and allegedly romantic contact with Amina, 



38

later turned out to be Bill Graber, a fifty-seven-year-old, heterosexual 

American. Both men claimed to have invented fictive personae to more 

credibly rally for a social group they were not part of. Cardell and Maguire’s 

(2015) pointed analysis uncovers the relevance of the power structures the 

case is contextualized within: “The hoax is dangerous because it cloaks the 

dominant narrative under the disguise of a subversive narrator who 

corroborates rather than disrupts the dominant narrative…It places a US 

readership in the privileged position of cardcarrying listener to the voice of a 

subordinate object whose ‘true’ story confirms the rightness of Western 

democracy and Orientalist discourses about Middle Eastern Otherness, 

evident, for example, in the cultural stereotype of the Arab woman as being in 

need of rescuing” (215f).

Conscious deceit is also used to troll or infiltrate political opponents and to 

spread fake news. Anonymous, for example, employed deception facilitated 

by anonymity to attack the white supremacist Hal Turner. Turner propagated 

racist views via his radio show and web site. Anonymous activists flooded the 

radio show with anonymous prank phone calls and the website with prank 

comments (Coleman 2014, 19f). This incidence is not an isolated case. Groups 

like Expose attempt to document illegal content of extreme right groups online 

and report it to the police. While this is not the official policy of the group, 

some members create fake accounts on social media—so-called “sock 

puppets”—to post racist comments, add right-wing individuals as friends, and 



39

like right-wing groups to gain the trust of the online community. When they 

are ultimately invited to secret chat rooms where strategy and future actions 

are planned, they gain access to valuable information (Bartlett 2015, 62ff). 

More sophisticated forms of deception are employed when anonymous 

programmers design social bots to present themselves as people on social 

media. On Twitter, bots simulating political supporters or activist groups tweet 

and retweet political content, heavily influencing which political messages are 

read online and potentially swaying election and referendum results. Both the 

campaigns of Donald Trump for US President in 2016 and for Brexit in the 

UK referendum in the same year were heavily supported by artificial agents 

whose puppeteers remained in the dark (Bastos and Mercea 2017; Bessi and 

Ferrara 2016).

ABSENCE AS PRESENCE IN THE PUBLIC SPHERE

When considering the antithetical character of anonymity as identity negation 

and creation and the resulting three sets of contradictory freedoms, the stark 

contrast between privacy and anonymity becomes evident: Neither inclusion, 

exclusion, subversion, submission, honesty, nor deception have much, if 

anything, in common with privacy. This is because they all relate to a crucial 

aspect of anonymity besides concealment. They all hint at the inherently 

discursive character of anonymity. This is also illustrated by the four modes of 

anonymous political participation discussed above: Voting, campaign funding, 

political writing, and masked collective action are all modes of 



40

communication in the public sphere. Thus, anonymity does not entail being let 

alone. On the contrary, anonymity only exists within a public discursive arena. 

The public sphere—the opposite of privacy—is the precondition for 

anonymity (cf. Barendt 2016, 13). 

This does not mean, however, that privacy and anonymity do not share any 

common features. They clearly overlap in their functions of shielding the 

democratic subject from interference by others, be they state actors, economic 

actors, or peers. However, while privacy withdraws both identity and content 

from public scrutiny, anonymity only shields identity while communicating 

content in the public sphere. Anonymity thus conveys one crucial feature of 

privacy, the concealment of identity, into the public sphere. It erodes the 

boundaries between the opposing binary of private versus public and 

facilitates a private form of engagement in the public discursive arena. By 

negating some aspects of the legally identified and physically embodied 

persona, anonymity transcends publicity and privacy, transforming private 

sentiments into political claims and transmitting them into the public sphere 

thus facilitating absence as presence. 

The three sets of contradictory freedoms afforded by anonymity can be a 

useful tool for future research; one should keep in mind, however, that reality 

is not necessarily as simple as heuristics. One form of anonymous political 

participation does not simply result in one of these freedoms but rather entails 

a combination or even all of these tendencies to a certain degree. Anonymity’s 



41

effects are always both positive and negative and remain contradictory. To 

further develop these categories, I suggest viewing them not as mutually 

exclusive, forming two poles on a continuum. Rather, their relations are to be 

understood as dialectical. Inclusion is defined by exclusion and vice versa. In 

other words, inclusion always rests on the exclusion of others, even if it is the 

exclusion of the one percent. Subversion by some aims at obtaining the 

submission of others. And what is an act of self-revelation by some is 

perceived as deception by others. 

To illustrate this dialectic dynamic, I introduce a last example. In her book, 

Veil, Rafia Zakaria (2017) contends that in the context of the enforcement of 

burka bans and Islamophobic media discourses, the practice of publicly 

wearing the veil becomes an act of political participation. While the gendered 

practice of veiling women does fulfill the function of submission in a social 

context dominated by patriarchal norms, the veil becomes a tool for 

subversion confronting Islamophobia and claiming diversity in the public 

sphere. “Veils thus are a form of resistance and rebellion, an extension of the 

private space of the harem where [the women] are protected, into the public 

realm” (71f). Thus, in a dialectical move, patriarchal practices of submission 

are transformed into acts of subversion to counter state forces of submission.

This dialectical move can also be investigated along the binary of honesty and 

deception. The German democratic theorist Hubertus Buchstein (1997) argues 

in his essay on online deliberation: “[T]he network presents an unreal world 



42

which allows all of us to create one or even more virtual identities… In most 

cases people pretend to have those positive characteristics they feel they lack. 

‘Virtual identities’ overall tend to be somehow ‘better’ than the real ones” 

(258f, emphasis added). The literature on masked collective action offers a 

different explanation. It interprets identity creation as revealing aspects of the 

multifaceted self: “The mask is related to transition, metamorphoses, the 

violation of natural boundaries, to mockery and familiar nicknames. It 

contains the playful element of life” (Bakhtin 1996 [1968], 40). While this 

essay compared cases of deception with cases of honesty, in practice all cases 

contain both aspects as the boundaries between reality and fiction blur. 

Referring to the Guy Fawkes mask (V-mask) employed by Anonymous, 

Cambre (2014) states: “The generative trait of the V-mask, as Deleuzian 

multiplicity, like the quality of undecideability, ensures resistance to 

representation because it provides a riddle rather than a clear relationship, it is 

a non-identity acting as-if an identity, but instead of choosing one or the other 

it oscillates between them. It rejects dominant ‘either/or’ alternatives” (318). 

The dialectic of anonymity’s contradictory freedoms is further complicated by 

a normative dimension. While the division in dichotomies of freedoms 

conducive and harmful to democracy might be a helpful heuristic, it is also 

necessary to think about positive and negative effects within each freedom. 

Suzanne Dovi (2009), for example, convincingly argues that exclusion is a 

necessary mode in democracy, as the access of privileged groups needs to be 

restricted in public decision-making bodies. Submission to commonly 



43

established rules and deception as expression of the multifaceted democratic 

subject are all positive aspects that contribute to a healthy democratic 

community, while inclusion can further privilege the more powerful, 

subversion can compromise security, and honesty might lead to hurt. 

Lastly, future empirical research will need to take the particular contexts in 

which these three sets of contradictory freedoms occur into account. Identity 

performances afforded by anonymity are highly context-dependent, as they 

rely on three contextual axes: (1) the materiality of the communicative 

infrastructure, (2) the positionality of the communicative subject within 

established power structures, and (3) the configuration of identity knowledge.

First, anonymous political participation depends on the materiality of the 

communicative infrastructure as it employs physical objects such as pens and 

paper, felt pens and bathroom walls, keyboards and computer screens, 

typewriters, masks, and digital objects such as avatars, emoticons, and 

pseudonyms. These objects play an essential role in anonymous identity 

performances. The perceived reality of the identity, for example, differs 

depending on whether physical masks or digital pseudonyms are used. The 

socio-cultural identity of the speaker is constructed differently if a political 

message is written on a bathroom wall or in a newspaper as a letter to the 

editor. The crucial role of communicative infrastructures becomes even more 

evident in the information age. The comparison of bathroom graffiti with 

posting in online forums illustrates this qualitative shift, which does not only 



44

affect the in/visibility of physically embodied identity but the dimensions of 

time and space. The increasing mediation of everyday communication 

establishes aspects of identity negation and creation as the norm. Anonymity 

becomes an integral part of our lives.

Second, the freedoms afforded by anonymity are affected by the positionality 

of the anonymous communicator within pre-existing social hierarchies. The 

social location affords different power resources to protestors and riot police, 

affluent and poor party funders, and heterosexual and homosexual graffiti 

scribblers. Linda Alcoff (1992) claims that the social position of the speaker 

alters the uttered content. Perceptions vary in accordance with the speaker’s 

social status. These pre-established hierarchies along the lines of identity 

categories like race, class, and gender, can be disrupted or amplified by 

anonymity. Alison Kinney (2016) elaborates how the material object of the 

hood reverses its meaning when it is employed by activists to protest racism in 

comparison to its use in executions. While the anonymity afforded by the hood 

enhances the position of protestors, it dehumanizes and degrades the 

condemned criminal. Similarly, the veil can amplify patriarchal structures 

submitting its wearer, while also empowering its wearer to confront state 

repression (Zakaria 2017). 

Third, configuration of identity knowledge form another crucial contextual 

condition of anonymous political participation. First, it matters which identity 

knowledge is conveyed by the identifiers used (pseudonyms, social security 



45

numbers, initials etc.) and which identity markers (gender, age, ethnicity etc.) 

of the legally identified and physically embodied persona are revealed. 

Second, it matters who is anonymous within a communicative space and who 

is not. The struggle of masked riot police and masked protestors exemplifies 

this on an apparent level. A more subtle level can be illustrated by the question 

of whether online user identities are known to operators of websites and 

accessible to hackers and government agents. Third, it matters whether 

anonymous participants have previous knowledge of each other and have pre-

established social relations or not. In workplace participation via anonymous 

online feedback tools, for example, participants might be formally unidentified 

but as the anonymity set is small, their identities might be easily deduced via 

social cues such as recognizable wording or content. In summary, the 

workings of anonymity’s contradictory freedoms are affected by who knows 

what about whom within a communicative setting.

This article presents the first undertaking to root anonymity in democratic 

theory. It contributes to future research on anonymity in political participation 

by generating three sets of contradictory freedoms (a) inclusion and exclusion, 

(b) subversion and submission, and (c) honesty and deception. These freedoms 

are to be analyzed in the context of (1) the materiality of communicative 

infrastructure, (2) the social positionality of communicative subjects, and (3) 

the configuration of identity knowledge. Future research on anonymity will 

need to investigate the value and validity of these concepts in the pressing 



46

challenge of explaining the ambiguous workings of anonymity in political 

participation. These challenges appear ever more important as anonymity 

becomes a central feature of the information age.

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