In 2012, a photography student named Katie decided to sign into a Chatroulette-style site called Omegle that matched her with a random user named Edison. With their shared love of photography and passion for Vampire Weekend (it was 2012) the two clicked. Eight months later, they moved in together.

This was the ideal scenario Omegle founder Leif K-Brooks had envisioned. Clearly he was onto something. By 2023, the platform had 73 million visitors a month and generated an estimated $200 million in revenue per year. But the entire functionality of the site rested on a single premise: anonymity. And, amid a shifting culture surrounding this principle, so core to the internet, Omegle would stumble and fall.

In 2022, a minor successfully sued the company after meeting a predator on the platform who later abused her. The pedophile, Ryan Fordyce, was convicted, but a landmark court decision also allowed Omegle to be held liable for “user anonymity and the absence of age restrictions.” Omegle, which was dissolved last November, attributed its demise to the case.

What made this verdict so striking was not that a predator had abused a child (we know that’s bad), but that a court legally passed on culpability to Omegle’s policy of anonymity. Far from an isolated case, this is part of a larger trend pointing to the erosion of anonymity in the US and around the world. Last year, then-presidential candidate Nikki Haley proposed ending user anonymity on social media platforms. Connecticut, Utah, Arkansas, Ohio, Georgia, New York and California have all either passed or proposed social media identity verification laws. In 2023 a group of bipartisan U.S. senators proposed a bill that mandated social media companies verify the ages of all users.

These laws aim to protect minors but, in practice, the law of unintended consequences might (for example) force every alt-health anon to nuke their account after ratio’ing the FDA. One looming piece of legislation, California’s SB 1228 proposed by state senator Steve Padilla in February, would require social media platforms to review the government-issued IDs of popular accounts. Who’s “popular”? The bar is low, with just 100,000 views of posts by a given account over a seven-day period constituting popularity. Padilla says the law is necessary to “weed out those that seek to corrupt our information stream.” 

Taken in its most charitable light, Padilla is aiming to curb the influence of foreign botnets and bolster child safety. These fears are not baseless; foreign actors have attempted to use fake personas to amplify propaganda and sow division on social media. However, there are privacy-preserving methods of rooting out bots, including analysis of posting patterns, message content, and network structure. And then there’s child safety.

Every child is on the internet — and so is every criminal. Given these facts of online life, the stakes are high. Parents blame platforms for social media addiction, depression, anxiety, inappropriate content and sexual abuse. Advocates of more stringent KYC-like processes argue that mandatory identity verification would shut the door on underage users and keep them out of harm’s way. It’s a simple fix, they claim, to a sprawling problem. For Padilla and supporters of this bill, the logic is simple: forcing people to verify their identities would keep bots out, safeguard children from harmful content, disarm disinformation campaigns, and bring some semblance of order to the internet.

One crucial claim made by supporters of these policies is that platforms can verify your identity without compromising your anonymity. They suggest that requiring users to prove their identity doesn’t necessarily mean exposing it to the public. Instead, platforms or third-party services would act as gatekeepers, ensuring anonymity in interactions while meeting regulatory demands.

The reality, however, is that there’s no such thing as anonymous identity verification. The plain meanings of anonymity (“don’t ask my name”) and identity verification (“tell me your name”) preclude it. As the Open Technology Institute put it, “There is no method yet for social media companies and other online services to confirm user age without requiring additional sensitive data.” If you’ve handed over your identity to anyone, you’ve badly failed the anonymity test.

Proponents of age verification often point to advanced cryptographic techniques as a solution that balances security and anonymity. These methods, such as zero-knowledge proofs, allow users to verify aspects of their identity — like their age — without exposing their full personal details. In theory, a platform could confirm that a user is over 18 without ever storing or even seeing their name, birthdate, or government ID. While these technologies are promising, their implementation at scale remains uncertain.

For users facing legal or reputational risks, such as political or religious minorities, even a slight chance of exposure is silencing. In 1960, Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black explained, “Persecuted groups and sects from time to time throughout history have been able to criticize oppressive practices and laws either anonymously or not at all.” Take China’s COVID-19 lockdown protests, where protesters relied on encrypted messaging apps and pseudonymous social media accounts to organize demonstrations and share real-time updates with the world. Anonymity was a lifeline, not a preference. Many feared being identified by authorities, who have used digital surveillance to detain activists, revoke passports, and charge individuals.

Since then China has required all social media users with over 500,000 followers to display their legal names. Tu Pao Ding, a pseudonymous account with 2 million followers, wrote, “With real-name rules looming, I plan to abandon this platform.” Others purged followers to avoid being covered by the regulation. “This policy will put many critical voices, already precarious, at further danger,” according to Eric Liu, a former Weibo censor.

In July 2024, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) targeted the anonymous messaging app NGL. NGL allows users to participate in Q&A games such as Ask Me Anything and Never Have I Ever. The app, which has over 300,000 reviews on the Apple Store, generates a link to an anonymous question form and directs users to post the link on their Instagram or Snapchat. The link invites followers to share anonymous messages that populate the app’s inbox.

In June, the FTC ordered NGL to ban users under 18. Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascón justified the move, stating, “The anonymity provided by the app can facilitate rampant cyberbullying.” NGL Labs agreed to a $5 million dollar settlement and to implement a Neutral Age Screen, which prompts new users to enter their birthday and restricts minors’ access, similar to what you would see when accessing a liquor company’s website. The order presumes anonymity itself is dangerous, a stance cautious corporate lawyers will adopt when designing their platforms. And while this age gate is not identity based, it has prompted fears that the FTC may expand the policy to require the use of ID checks or require invasive age verification in future orders to other companies.

One of the five FTC commissioners, Andrew Ferguson, wrote his own opinion critiquing the order. “It does not follow, however, that the marketing of anonymous messaging services to minors necessarily violates Section 5,” he wrote. “Indeed, I strongly believe it does not.” He continued, “The Anglo-American tradition of anonymous speech is ancient and rich.” The majority of the FTC’s commissioners did not sign on to Ferguson’s concurrence. Ferguson’s campaign for FTC Chairman promises to “end the FTC’s attacks on online anonymity.”

Courts across the country have decided their cases the same way as the Omegle case. These disputes present nuanced legal questions, but the courts dealt bluntly with identity verification, holding that any platform without bulletproof age verification is facially defective. A California state court explained, “[Meta] relies on a user’s self-reported age when they sign up for the platform . . . Snapchat’s age verification systems are similarly defective.” Here, California rejects the Neutral Age Gate of the FTC in favor of privacy-stripping verification.

If upheld, these decisions could require users to submit government-issued IDs to register for access — not only to post but to read (or “lurk,” as some would have it). This wouldn’t just apply to social media and forums but potentially email, food review sites, and even local news comment sections. The result would be that everyone on the internet is named, if not to all users then at least to the platforms or some third-party verification service.

When an idea is popular in a democracy, it doesn’t need protection. But when the public condemns an idea and hunts its supporters, minority-idea-holders will usually just shut up. Anonymous speech allows everyday people to challenge traditional or oppressive ideas while avoiding arrest, firing or social stigma. As we’ve seen over the past five years or so, without it anyone rejecting dearly-held norms may be attacked by cadres of civil society organizations or journalists. Emails will go out to employers: “Do you condemn your employee’s condemnable views?”

While the internet seems to require identity verification, the reality is that it’s only made anonymity essential. One badly wrought opinion could result in permanent reputational damage. In this sense, anonymity protects us not only from the tyranny of the social-standards-setting majority but also from the tyranny of hyper-vocal minorities who regulate speech on the internet. As K-Brooks put it, “[U]nless the tide turns soon, the internet I fell in love with may cease to exist, and in its place, we will have something closer to a souped-up version of TV.”

The battle for anonymity is also the battle for truth. And the battle for truth should be fought on level ground, on the broadest possible field. But if governments force speakers to walk the narrow bridge of verification, anyone with anything distinctive to say will be silenced. Without the shield of anonymity, only the naïve or the indifferent will remain online. The risk we run is that the internet will become safe for those with nothing to fear — but not for those with something to say.
—James Ostrowski