Pseudonyms on the Web

Stanley Kurtz has taken issue with FrumForum allowing contributors to post under a pseudonym.

Stanley Kurtz puts a question directly to me in his reply to Eugene Debs: What do I think of pseudonyms on the web?

I offered a partial answer to that question some months ago in conversation with former Federal Election Commissioner Brad Smith:

David Frum explains why several contributors to his new website, Frum Forum, prefer to use pseudonyms: “Often, the contributor is a government employee concerned about the consequences of speaking too frankly about the work of his bureaucracy. In one case, the author was writing about wrongdoing by someone he regularly encountered socially.”

It's not only government employees who must worry that their day-job employers won't like what they write, especially these days. Nor is it only my site that allows people to write pseudonymously. For sure pseudonyms can be abused: there are bloggers who hurl personal abuse at others while concealing their own identity. Happily there is none of that occurring in this case. But pseudonyms are not abusive in themselves, for reasons well explained by Brad Smith:

A political culture that focuses excessively on the “who” rather than the “what”—one that fosters the view that if we know who wrote an opinion, it is not necessary to read the opinion itself—is not healthy. Look at the comments section in almost any political blog, on the left or the right, and you’ll see comments almost uniformly taking a quick turn into attacks on the identity and motivation of the writers. The decline in the quality of our civic discourse can’t be dumped entirely at the foot of mandatory disclosure, of course. But laws that regard the identity of speakers as fundamental to the public’s ability to judge arguments may well exacerbate a thoughtless, partisan, nasty brand of political debate.