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As part of a pre-election pitch about protecting Australians online, the federal government wants to make it easier to reveal the identity of people behind anonymous online accounts so they can be sued for defamation. 

A draft of the bill will be released later this week, but the gist of it is that it will force social media companies to obtain the names and contact details of their Australian users or be held liable for comments made on their platform. 

There’s scant evidence to suggest that forcing users to submit identification will have a noticeable effect on online abuse. In a roundtable convened by Twitter Australia last month, public policy director Kara Hinesley cited the insufficient evidence a 2004 Korean law that collected users’ ID decreased hateful comments, defamation or online policy, Guardian Australia reports. (The proposal is so common that it has a name: the white man’s gambit.)

Whether requiring identification will reduce cyberbullying and online abuse is unclear but it’s a basic fact that making it easier to unmask users will threaten the security that comes with online anonymity.

Marginalised people or those speaking up against the powerful use anonymity as a way to be heard without having to face vengeance. In an explainer on the merits of online anonymity, online advocacy group Digital Rights Watch Australia quotes the UN’s former special rapporteur on freedom of expression David Kaye: “Strong encryption and anonymity are fundamental for the protection of human rights in the digital age and are critical to individuals who face persecution because of their sexual orientation or gender identity. Anonymity has been a crucial tool for women and sexual minorities for self-expression, connecting, and mobilising and the use of anonymity online supports the most vulnerable groups.”

Here three people who’ve used anonymous or pseudonymous accounts explain why protecting their identity is crucial to what they do.

Andy Fleming, anti-fascist researcher

Fleming is Australia’s best known researcher on the far right. For more than a decade he has helped identify and chronicle those who perpetrate fascism and racism in Australia. For him, using an online pen name is critical to his safety.

“Maintaining [a relative degree of] anonymity means I’m much less likely to be killed or injured by fascist stalkers and/or have my family and friends targeted for abuse and harassment,” he said.

Fleming has concerns about how the proposed “anti-trolling” bill will work. He doubts whether it will do much about trolling — ”sock puppetry and other such tactics are extremely common” — but thinks that it could chill free speech as people choose to remain off platforms rather than give up their identity. 

Gala Vanting, sex worker

Vanting is a sex worker who represents Scarlett Alliance, Australia’s peak sex worker body. She says anonymity and pseudonymity provide a cornerstone of safety and privacy for the sex industry — particularly in an industry that still faces criminalisation in many parts of Australia. 

“Sex workers and our clients place a high value on the ability to communicate anonymously or pseudonymously online, because we value privacy,” she said. “Many sex workers have pseudonymous public lives, and depend on the ability to distinguish our legal details from the personas we assume at work.”

Vanting says sex workers already face surveillance, stigma and criminalisation, and this law would only worsen things for them.

Greg Jericho, former public servant

Until 2011, Jericho was known as Grog’s Gamut, an anonymous Australian blogger writing about politics, economics, sport and film. He was also a public servant who was limited from partaking fully in public discussion due to his employment — although he says he never wrote about his work and didn’t engage in abuse. 

“Anonymous or pseudonymous accounts allow people who for reasons of employment or personal situation cannot use their names to comment on issues and to discuss things without a fear that their HR manager is trawling their feed for reasons to discipline them — as has certainly occurred for public servants,” he said. 

His identity was exposed in a piece in The Australian. Since then, Jericho has worked for the ABC and Guardian Australia writing under his own name. He’s critical of the proposed bill: “These proposed laws have nothing to do with bullying of kids. They are about limiting criticism of the powerful and also limiting who gets to have a say.”