“Then I’ll go up to your office and we’ll see about it.” Álex Grijelmo enters the cafeteria of this newspaper, turns off his cell phone and shrugs his shoulders: “Every day I have linguistic questions from journalists.” It is normal when you have a doctorate in journalism and when you have a dozen books of the caliber of the Stylebook from EL PAÍS, The journalist’s style o to Proposal for agreement on inclusive language. For his latest essay, Grijelmo (Burgos, 68 years old) has decided to get involved with a topic that has not been widely explored even though it could not be more current: anonymity and the misuse that 21st century society makes of it.
“Anonymity encourages pedophilia on the Internet, the recruitment of terrorists, scams on defenseless people in new technologies; Anonymity encourages insult, defamation, slander, all the insults within the human capacity; Anonymity serves to throw a stone and hide one’s face, for sexist harassment and for the proliferation of robots that pose as people to favor dark interests.” It is the central thesis that can be read in the pages of The perversion of anonymity (Taurus). There it is nothing. What makes you get into this topic? “Being a journalist,” he answers firmly. “Being a journalist and being from a balcony observing reality, and reviewing or editing news that has to do with deplorable events related to anonymity.” That anonymity, those “merciless attacks” that occur from anonymous accounts lead, at the very least, to the abandonment of courtesy and, at the most, from depression to suicide.
The book has an encyclopedic vocation (“Since I was thinking about this matter, I wanted to make a complete treatise”), and its first half X-rays the uses that anonymity has had throughout history, many of them positive: protected witnesses , the secret of confession, artificial insemination, spies… “Anonymity has always existed, the thing is that it has never had such perverse effects as now,” says Grijelmo, who points out cases such as those of Amanda Todd or Tiziana Cantone, who committed suicide after cyberbullying campaigns; that of the French professor Samuel Paty, beheaded by a radical Islamist after a smear campaign on social networks; or that of the presenter Lara Siscar and her anonymous stalker.
“In the end we all have more or less close cases,” says Grijelmo, who has suffered firsthand, like so many, anonymous insults in the comments of his articles and who does not know if these attacks come from a professor or a student of secondary: “By being anonymous, all criticism is weighed on the same scale.” “The problem,” he explains, “is that we don’t even have statistics. We do not know what percentage of suicides depend on abuse on the Internet or networks; We don’t know what percentage of psychiatric problems in adolescents or even adults are related to this. Fortunately, now we have, for example, statistics on sexist violence, but we have nothing measured about digital attacks.” Do you think that those people who insult from anonymity have the same bad conscience that a person who insults to your face may have? “No. He who insults on the networks does not see the eyes of the person he is addressing. He presses a key at a given moment and ignores the consequences. “It’s like attacking from behind, like shooting from behind, which was frowned upon even in Western movies, treacherously.”
All kinds of stories about anonymity, but also about pseudonyms, cryptonyms or heteronyms, parade through the pages of the book. If you had the scoop that Superman is Clark Kent, would you publish it? “No, because pseudonymity is also a right. Writers like B. Traven or Elena Ferrante have the right not to let their names be known, if they do not harm anyone.” In the same way, that right can be lost. A self-confessed footballer, he gives the example of the racist insults that Real Madrid player Vinicius received from a handful of ultras in Valencia. “Everyone in the stadium had the right to anonymity. Except them: the moment they insulted, they lost that right.”
Pseudonymity is important in a book whose second part explores possible laws or actions to “limit, rather than prohibit,” anonymity. For Grijelmo, a law is needed that gives certain rights to anonymous expression in certain circumstances, but at the same time condemns the abuse of that capacity. For example, the book studies a proposal by lawyer Borja Adsuara for a system of pseudonyms of which records are kept, to identify those who attack with their fictitious name. Grijelmo goes further with a very detailed proposal in the book: “It would be similar to a car’s license plate: it doesn’t put your name on it, but the police can know who you are if you commit an infraction.” In addition, he proposes putting more emphasis on those who have the most followers: “There are people with disproportionate influence, and what they say has more impact. In the same way that publishing a news item in EL PAÍS is not the same as publishing it in a small town newspaper.” He is pessimistic about the current state of the conversation, but not about the future: “Humanity has been able to organize the Olympic Games on a global scale, to follow the guidelines of the World Health Organization in a pandemic, we have been capable of organizing air traffic… why shouldn’t we be able to regulate anonymity on the Internet?”
The first known name is Kushim, an accountant from Mesopotamia who 5,000 years ago put his name on a clay tablet to certify 29,086 measures of barley. Following his path, Grijelmo takes responsibility, with his first and last name, for everything written in this book, which can be summarized in a phrase that he pronounces with conviction: “It is worth walking towards the idea that acting on the Internet and in social networks “With your own name you contribute to improving the world.”