The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #170110   Message #4113521
Posted By: Charmion
16-Jul-21 - 10:10 AM
Thread Name: BS: Anonymous social media posts
Subject: RE: BS: Anonymous social media posts
MeganL, at the risk of boring you, may I suggest that people with good reason to be anonymous stay off the Internet, especially social media?

My husband was a legal officer in the Canadian Army, specializing in defence at Court Martial, and after retirement he was a small-town criminal defence lawyer. As a member of Mudcat, he always posted under his real initials (CET), following the Cold War rule: never say or do anything in public that you're not prepared to see blared to the world. He never signed up for Facebook or any other social media platform, knowing that a too-prominent public profile would complicate his life in ways that he did not wish to manage.

Everyone who works with victims of crime -- especially those leaving abusive relationships -- gives the same advice: keep your head down and stay off the Internet. No, it's not fair that they aren't safe on Facebook or Linked In, but life's like that. Incidentally, people who use Facebook for business purposes set their privacy level at "public" so non-members can see their pages.

Anonymity is not the answer, for it leads to bad behaviour. The never-mentioned Martin Gibson of vile memory would not have been such a massive jerk on this forum if his offences could have been swiftly laid at his real-life door, with prejudice.