Anonymity Effects
Mainack Mondal, Denzil Correa, Fabrício Benevenuto
Abstract
Today online social media sites function as the medium of expression for billions of users. As a result, aside from conventional social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, platform designers introduced many alternative social media platforms (e.g., 4chan, Whisper, Snapchat, Mastodon) to serve specific userbases. Among these platforms, anonymous social media sites like Whisper and 4chan hold a special place for researchers. Unlike conventional social media sites, posts on anonymous social media sites are not associated with persistent user identities or profiles. Thus, these anonymous social media sites can provide an extremely interesting data-driven lens into the effects of anonymity on online user behavior. However, to the best of our knowledge, currently there are no publicly available datasets to facilitate research efforts on these anonymity effects.