On January 18 2025, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez addressed an audience of the most powerful figures across politics and business at the World Economic Forum in Davos. In his speech, Sanchez called for measures to end online anonymity, stating that European governments are permitting people to roam freely on social networks without linking their profiles to a real identity, and posited that this allows people to act without being held accountable for their actions. This builds upon similar proposals by other leaders including the former Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz and the German government’s steps to regulate social media platforms. Sanchez intends to follow this up by submitting formal legislation to the European Union Council at their meeting on March 20-21, requiring the real identities behind accounts to be registered with authorities through a ‘European Digital Identity Wallet’.
As social media becomes an increasingly greater component of political discourse, the effects have increasingly come under scrutiny. However, impeding the rights of individuals to utilise anonymity to freely express themselves goes against fundamental democratic principles.
First and foremost, mapping online activity against legal identities has a chilling effect on free expression. Democracy is founded on the idea that citizens have the right to civic engagement in their polity, and thus their ability to complement this through open and unconditional discourse is an intrinsic pillar of political participation. But how safe can people truly feel in expressing themselves if this is to be traced by the state and mapped in databases by government officials? Of what use is a vote if one cannot fully explore the matters to be voted upon? Removing online anonymity risks levels of self-censorship as to suppress free dialogue and thus the political participation required for representative government.
Moreover, it is often marginalised communities and perspectives that most rely on the assurances of anonymity to make their voices heard, and abolishing this threatens to quash their propensity for civic engagement, pushing them further into the periphery. With reference to the ‘far-right populists’ that PM Sanchez and other anti-anonymity campaigners wish to silence, driving them underground simply leads to echo chambers that ferment unchallenged, heightened fervour.
Beyond freedom of expression, anonymity has proven essential for whistleblowers to expose corruption and malfeasance, often relating to anti-democratic practices. Whether it’s the writing of the Federalist Papers and the Novanglus essays by the American Founding Fathers under pseudonyms, or Mark Felt acting as the anonymous source in the Watergate scandal, anonymity has again and again been indispensable for keeping the powerful accountable. So too do journalists and activists rely on it to report on abuses of power and maintain the public transparency needed for credible democracies. This is demonstrated in the protections that international law gives reporters to maintain ‘source confidentiality’.
Mass surveillance of online activities additionally has the unfortunate consequence of reversing the accountability that governments are held to by citizens. It inverts this relationship such that people must instead account to the state for the words they say, and legislators become less a servant of the public than a warden. Anonymity is vital for keeping citizens safe from the possibility of reprisals by authorities who seek to shut down dissenting speech, and so safeguards the capacity for people and their ideas to shape the democracies they live in. Abolishing this would be the tumbling of another domino in the slippery slope of ever-greater surveillance and the degradation of privacy rights that are meant to help differentiate nations like Spain and its fellow EU members from totalitarian regimes.
Regarding dictatorships, citizens of Europe and North America have been asked to sacrifice greatly in the fight for the Ukrainian right to self-determination in the face of Russia’s invasion. EU states have contributed~$145 billion in various assistance measures, with a further $175 billion from the U.S., to say nothing of the enormous surge in energy prices resulting from the sanctions held against Russia. Yet the moral high-ground that justifies asking citizens to shoulder such burdens on behalf of political ideals is delegitimised when these same governments propose enacting the same kinds of authoritarian policies that they would be quick to criticise Russia for. To sustain this battle for democracy in the face of military threat, we must maintain our own systems as model examples and let living out our principles underscore our commitment to challenging dictators around the world.
Looking into the past, we see many historical examples of occasions when authorities have sought to curtail anonymity. The Russian word ‘samizdat’ translates literally to ‘self-publishing’, and refers to all materials not produced through the state-controlled printing presses in the Soviet Union. Such practice was harshly punished within the USSR, as the only way to express alternative narratives to Stalin’s propaganda was through anonymous means outside of state censorship. Likewise, in an effort to crackdown on anti-monarchy dissent, France’s pre-revolutionary Ancien Régime required that authors of any work be granted approval by royal censors, thereby making anonymous publishing impossible.
Now, as then, Europe must resist calls to eradicate online anonymity, and firmly stand by the democratic values that so much has been sacrificed for. Rather than surrendering to calls for authoritarian suppression, policymakers should instead focus on forming strong legal frameworks to protect free speech while addressing whatever concerns may arise surrounding disinformation and online harassment. Online anonymity is a paramount mechanism for protecting free speech, empowering citizens and maintaining truly open and classically liberal societies, and must not be relinquished for either political posturing nor misguided attempts to control narratives and information.
Strade Cadillay is Co-Director of the International Association for Democracy: a non-partisan charity that advocates for democracy and its fundamental principles, such as freedom of speech, free and fair elections, political representation and accountable leadership.
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In an ideal world it would not be necessary to have the option of anonymity online and every individual would feel free and empowered to say what they think in their own name BUT with a guaranteed freedom that mere online words had no bearing upon their actual and accountable deeds. Unfortunately this isn’t the case and TPTB are far more concerned with monitoring ‘thought crimes’ expressed on line than on the more challenging task of tackling real crimes. It’s also cynical that TPTB extensively use anonymity and third parties to push approved narratives, but this is of course acceptable (for them but not for the plebs).
I also detect an agenda for both divide and rule and souped up hate crime prosecution – the archetypal church going elderly spinster in the village isn’t as likely to voice online Islamaphobia if the woke female Vicar can see and attribute it, nor will most people risk online voicing of anything that goes against the official line on current ‘correct’ viewpoints if they know the Police will be calling.
Remove the ability to let off steam or even question anything and thoughts may instead turn into actions, but such common sense reasoning is as usual lacking.