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YikYak broadcasts anonymous ‘yaks’ to the 500 closest users, making it the nuclear version of graffiti in a toilet cubicle
YikYak broadcasts anonymous ‘yaks’ to the 500 closest users, making it the nuclear version of graffiti in a toilet cubicle

Do the new anonymous social media apps encourage us to overshare?

This article is more than 9 years old
Whisper, YikYak, Rumr: the latest apps encourage you to share the worst with everyone in your address book – anonymously

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In 2009, when he was barely 25 and his net worth was a mere $2bn, Mark Zuckerberg delivered what remains possibly the scariest line of the social media age. When you're using Facebook, he told his biographer David Kirkpatrick, "you have one identity… The days of you having a different image for your work friends [and] for the other people you know are probably coming to an end… Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity." Orwellian as that might sound, Zuckerberg was really only expressing the emerging Silicon Valley consensus: henceforth, life would be lived entirely in public.

It's long been conventional wisdom in the tech world that nobody got rich betting against Facebook. Yet since the start of this year, a cluster of new apps has spread rapidly by attempting exactly that, offering anonymous ways to share the secret stuff we'd never want linked to our names: the shameful confessions, private fears, suppressed desires and malicious gossip. Their names evoke dark alleyways and lips placed close to ears: Whisper, Confide, Secret, Sneeky, Backchat, Rumr, Truth.

"Social networking has changed the way we socialise – we've lost the ability to be open and vulnerable with one another, because we're always worrying about the permanent record," Chrys Bader-Wechseler told me recently. The 30-year-old sounded a little bleary: he'd been up until 5am that day overseeing the worldwide rollout of Secret, the app he co-founded, which works by accessing your phone's contacts, so you know the confessions you're reading are from your friends, or friends of friends. (It went live in the US in January, and soon attracted $8.6m in venture capital.) "We want to lower the bar," Bader-Wechseler said, "so that friends can let themselves be vulnerable again." The day I installed Secret, someone whose number is stored on my phone wrote: "Whenever I'm tempted to cheat, I think about my son, and how much a broken family would hurt him." I knew the person who'd written it, but I didn't know who'd written it; the combination was to prove highly addictive.

By inviting us to communicate anonymously – not just the trolls, or people with specific reasons to stay incognito – the new generation of apps has launched a real-world test of a puzzle that goes back to Plato. When our identities are concealed, do we automatically degenerate into amoral, foul-mouthed bullies? Or, freed from the pressure of maintaining a flawless public facade, might we discover new ways to relate to one another with compassion and honesty?

Admittedly, the indications so far aren't especially promising. The most obvious applications of online anonymity are cyberbullying and abuse; YikYak, which launched late last year and claims 250,000 users, has already been blamed for at least two evacuations, one lockdown and much general chaos at American high schools. The app uses geolocation to broadcast anonymous "yaks" to the 500 physically closest users, effectively making it the nuclear-weapons version of a message scrawled in a toilet cubicle. (In Alabama, two teenagers were charged with making terrorist threats after announcing plans for two separate school shootings via YikYak; the company has now "geo-fenced" the locations of 180,000 US schools, in an effort to make it unusable.) Meanwhile, the biggest splash made so far by Whisper was a message posted a month before Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin's "conscious uncoupling" – naming the entertainment lawyer with whom Paltrow was allegedly conducting an affair. (Her publicist denied it.)

Even Secret, where things tend to feel more grown-up, has drawn the censure of several prominent venture capitalists, not normally the kind of people to spurn money-making opportunities on ethical grounds. "It's gossip. Slander. Hateful. Hurtful," wrote one of them, Mark Suster. "It's everything the Valley claims to hate about LA, but seemingly are falling over themselves at cocktail parties to check five times a night." In April, technical problems brought Secret to a halt. A headline on TechCrunch.com read: "Secret App Down For Hours, Silicon Valley Goes Back To Work".

It's hard to deny that non-anonymous social media – Facebook, above all – have created an irksome pressure to maintain a consistent, upbeat, ultra-competent public persona at all times. As a new psychology study seems to argue every other week, Facebook contributes to the sum of human misery, by exposing us only to the highlights reel of other people's lives, making us feel dissatisfied or unworthy by comparison, and fuelling a competitive urge to portray an even sunnier facade. Or, as Montesquieu put it: "If we only wanted to be happy it would be easy; but we want to be happier than other people, which is almost always difficult, since we think them happier than they are."

The result is a "game of one-upmanship that's never-ending," says Neetzan Zimmerman, who recently joined Whisper from Gawker. "When you're on Facebook and a friend says 'I have a baby!', you're immediately forced to produce a baby as well, and then that baby has to do something amazing first. Your life must look basically perfect, but beneath the surface you're dealing with the emotional issues that everybody has. There's no room for that on Facebook. You can't both have a perfect life and say: 'Hey, I have a number of illnesses', or: 'My wife left me.' Because you've built this identity for yourself that you cannot expose to the light."

There are further problems, such as the phenomenon of multiple social circles: what 13-year-old is going to speak candidly on Facebook when their parents and possibly grandparents are on it, too? Another is the way that past indiscretions are never past any more. (Might British politics have taken a different course if there'd been Facebook photos of Nick Clegg setting fire to a cactus as a student in Germany in the 1980s?) "Ephemeral" services like Snapchat, on which shared pictures and video vanish after a few seconds, are a direct reaction to the discomfort this causes.

A Facebook page
'On Facebook and Twitter, for all the sense of performance, there are certain constraints on our showing off: we might want to be noticed, but we also want to look accomplished, and either respectable or cool' Photograph: PA

It's overwhelmingly in Facebook's interests to have all our messages and snapshots, our purchase history and reading lists, linked to a single and genuine identity: that's the way to make a fortune from targeted advertising, and it's the reason the firm is so vigilant in deleting what it suspects are fake accounts. But it's much less clear that it's in our interests. Critics tend to talk about anonymous and ephemeral apps as if they're a radical and generally sinister development: witness the media panic over Snapchat sexting. Yet it's just as plausible to argue that it's Facebook's undiscriminating publicness that's the radical thing. Before the internet, we navigated multiple, shifting levels of privacy with barely a thought. Now that's harder than ever. But haven't there always been some things we needed to say without everybody knowing we said them?

The Ring of Gyges – as any first-year philosophy student who's not too busy exchanging dirty jokes on YikYak ought to know – is a mythical invisibility device featured in Plato's Republic. Would anyone behave decently, the book's characters wonder, if nobody could see them? Glaucon, Plato's brother, is gloomy on the matter: "No man would keep his hands off what was not his own, when he could safely take what he liked out of the market." Socrates has a more optimistic view: we're happier when we do the right thing, so we'd soon learn to behave ethically, even when unseen. But the short history of the internet has tended to bolster Glaucon's case. "Any app or tool that enhances anonymity will contribute to the general feeling of a disinhibited space where actions and behaviours don't carry consequences," argues Elias Aboujaoude, a Stanford University psychiatrist and author of the 2011 book Virtually You: The Dangerous Powers of the E-Personality. The web comic Penny Arcade summed things up more pungently in what it termed The Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory, expressed as a simple formula: "Normal Person + Anonymity + Audience = Total Fuckwad".

Yet the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory may not be quite correct. The "online disinhibition effect", as it was formally named in 2004 by the psychologist John Suler, is more about online behaviour in general than anonymity specifically. Suler's work described how people become more abusive towards those they can't see, or who are physically distant from them – even when the aggressor's identity isn't hidden. Furthermore, he argues, we often approach cyberspace as a separate dimension, where the usual rules don't apply

The truth is that, when people do don the cloak of anonymity on Whisper or Secret, they seem far more likely to slip into the language of the confessional, or the therapist's couch, than of the poison pen letter. The platforms are full of personal disclosures, sometimes searingly intense, more often just marginally embarrassing:

My baby boy passed away recently I saw his picture today and cried. I cried because I love him and miss him. I'm a guy, so no one thinks to talk to me.

I still feel tempted to go the wrong way on escalators.

I work in a six-figure job and hate almost all the people in my industry as soulless drones.

My 13-year-old makes me cry almost every day. She talks to me like I'm a piece of shit.

That embarrassing moment when you mean to call someone from the toilet but you Facetime them instead.

"I do personally believe that basically people are good," says Bader-Wechseler of Secret. "Having this raw, uncut stream of thought from other people forces you to self-reflect, and you have this feeling – or at least this is how it feels for me – of connection. It's a very introspective, personal experience." On the new anonymous apps, in contrast to some older services such as Ask.fm, there are no stable identities at all, even fake ones: each post is a one-off, unlinked to any others, so there's less incentive for users to try to acquire trollish reputations using pseudonyms.

That said, the relative absence of malice is also down to strenuous efforts to rein it in, not least because the companies' expansion, and potential future income from advertising, depend on it. Since your posts come from your phone, your number can be banned if you overstep the mark; Whisper employs more than 120 human moderators to comb its messages for abuse. Whisper tries to detect if you're entering a proper name, and will only let you continue if it's the name of a public figure: "Brad Pitt" but not just Brad, "Jennifer Lawrence" but not Jennifer, who might be a colleague or classmate. (It's unclear what happens if the non-celebrity's name actually is Jennifer Lawrence.)

And there are a handful of cases in which the new apps do seem to have made the world a better place. When a student in Virginia used YikYak to reveal suicidal thoughts, says the app's 23-year-old co-founder Tyler Droll, "there was a huge response from students nearby: 'We love you, stay safe.' A group of YikYakkers went to his dorm – they went to talk to him and got him the help that they needed." (The story hasn't been officially confirmed.) Another student user, in Tennessee, summoned 1,000 people in the vicinity to have their mouths swabbed as potential blood-donor matches for a relative with a rare form of lymphoma, Droll says.

It's possible to envisage the services changing the way we communicate in other fundamental ways. YikYak already permits users to "peek" into the conversations happening in other locations – only American universities, so far, but Droll hopes the function will let people immerse themselves, from a distance, in breaking news events. Given sufficient users in, say, Kiev, you wouldn't have to hunt for the best Twitter or Facebook accounts to follow; you'd just select a central location in the Ukrainian capital and be plunged immediately into a stream of anonymous thoughts from that vicinity. "Imagine the World Cup in Brazil, or the military coup in Thailand," Droll says. "Imagine being able to look into those places in real time, unbiased and unfiltered." (In oppressive regimes, the apps will undoubtedly need to give a greater guarantee of true anonymity than they currently can; most make it clear that they'll hand over user data in response to law enforcement requests, and their vulnerability to hackers is unclear.)

Zimmerman, at Whisper, sees that app evolving into an unprecedented species of news source – "a mountain of untold stories" concerning not only alleged celebrity infidelity, but also personal accounts of hard-to-discuss topics, like sexual assault on university campuses. (The discussions beneath such postings are notable for their supportiveness and compassion.) Whisper recently announced a partnership with Buzzfeed, allowing the viral-content site to plunder its messages for articles; Whisper-based stories so far include 17 Alarming Confessions of Revenge, 13 Scandalous Wedding Confessions and 17 Confessions From British Teachers. "On a school trip to Amsterdam I spent £300 on a brothel and spent the remainder of the night in a cafe," read one note in the latter collection, purportedly from a geography teacher.

After hanging around on several anonymous services for a couple of weeks – mainly as a reader, occasionally as a poster, and no, I'm obviously not going to reveal what I wrote – I began to notice something strange. Nastiness wasn't the dominant tone, but then again neither was heartfelt human-to-human confession, nor the teary-eyed discussion of taboos. On Whisper, sex was a fairly big deal; users can contact each other through their messages, so it has naturally become a forum for setting up casual encounters. But the truly dominant thing, everywhere, was attention-seeking: jokes, cod-philosophical pronouncements, wry observations about people's behaviour in restaurants. On any public network, that wouldn't have been a surprise; when I try to be funny on Twitter, it's partly for the ego-massage of favourites and retweets linked to my name. Secret and Whisper have similar favouriting systems, but I'd assumed they wouldn't matter much. Who cares about receiving an accolade when nobody will ever know you received it?

Lots of people, apparently. The new apps show how attention has become "not merely a means to the end of furthering some content, brand, or yourself, but… an end in and of itself," says Nathan Jurgenson, a social media theorist who also works as a researcher for Snapchat. On Facebook and Twitter, for all the sense of performance, there are certain constraints on our showing off: we might want to be noticed, but we also want to look accomplished, and either respectable or cool, and we don't want to say things that might later be revealed as lies. With our identities hidden, we're freed to do what we want – and what many of us want most of all is to go viral. "These apps need to sell the fiction that what people are posting really are secrets," Jurgenson says. Sometimes, they might be. But they're more likely to be lurid fabrications, or, for all you know, people just being smart alecks:

Today I found out that my son isn't actually gay… he just told me that so that then I'd let him have girls in his bedroom.

When customers don't say "thank you" I intentionally say "you're welcome", just to throw them off.

I babysit for atheists. I teach their daughter about God.

Dear person with a fuckton of items in the "15 items or less" lane, I hate you.

Plato would have been surprised. And maybe rather depressed. When their identities are hidden, some people turn malicious, and others become candid or disarmingly kind. Generally, though, even when we're invisible, we just want to be noticed.

This article was edited on 9 June 2014. In the original, we said that Secret employed 120 moderators, when it is Whisper that employs that many. Similarly, the caption to the main image originally referred to Secret when it is YikYak that broadcasts 'yaks'. Both have been corrected.

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