Two reactions of Britain’s political classes to the riots that have spread like a rash across the country were fantastically predictable. One was to blame the Russians — something that has been done since the Broadwater Farm riot in 1985. Chris Bayliss tossed and gored this nonsense in these pages. 

Another was to blame online anonymity. Anons are a perennial bugbear of Britain’s journalists and politicians. Somehow, they were held responsible for the killing of David Amess, whose murderer was radicalised not by 4Chan but by ISIS.

Now, Miriam Cates, the former MP for Penistone and Stockbridge, has written for the Telegraph that social media platforms should ban anonymous accounts because “online anonymous users can say whatever they like without repercussions” and “freedom without responsibility is just anarchy”.

On Twitter, meanwhile, Tobias Ellwood, former MP for Bournemouth East, yells:

TIME TO REMOVE SOCIAL MEDIA ANONYMITY [his obnoxious upper case letters]

We cannot allow the use of social media to so effectively promote disinformation & rally violence that’s now ripping communities apart across the country.

There is, I should say, a difference between anonymity and pseudonymity. In the latter case, people use a name — just a name that is different from their own. For the sake of simplicity, though, I’m going to follow Cates and Ellwood in eliding the two.

First, it is worth saying that the riots are taking place in real life and not online. The streets have to be policed more than social media. The rioters who have engaged in the worst forms of violence and vandalism do not even seem to have made much effort to hide their identities. (They feel empowered by the apparent weakness of the state today, but are liable to discover that it has all the time in the world to come and ensure that they do not touch a woman for a decade.)

Cates asserts that violent scenes “were almost wholly the result of misleading posts that spread like wildfire on social media”. She’s referring to false claims that the alleged murderer of the three girls in Southport was a Muslim refugee. I’m sure that played a role in channeling hostility. But are we really meant to think that the alleged killer being a second-generation immigrant with Rwandan parents is much less provocative? It’s not as if the chaos fizzled out when his actual identity was revealed.

Besides, I do not think it was anonymous accounts that were key to spreading the misinformation. Major accounts that promoted fake news included people with real names, like Bernie Spofforth, Andrew Tate, Laurence Fox and David Atherton. The idea that posting as yourself necessarily encourages moral and factual restraint cannot survive half an hour on Twitter or Facebook. (An especially ironic aspect of our online media landscape, indeed, is how often the watchdogs of contemporary discourse spread misinformation, such as Nick Lowles of Hope Not Hate promoting the apparently baseless rumour that a Muslim woman had been attacked with acid before awkwardly acknowledging a police denial.)

I have no idea, then, what banning online anonymity would achieve. It would not stop the riots, and I see no reason to believe that it would have stopped the riots or would stop riots from happening again.

It would also do a lot of harm, as someone like Mrs Cates, who knows of the excesses of cancel culture, should appreciate. As I wrote before, in a response to Jordan Peterson:

Expressing unfashionable sentiments can inspire online mobs to seek real-life retribution: trying to get people fired or even arrested. If (like Peterson or I) you are fortunate enough to make your money expressing at least somewhat unfashionable opinions, that might not be a big problem. If, on the other hand, you make your money filling spreadsheets, making cars or cutting hair, it means you can’t express yourself online under your real name without facing the risk of weirdos ruining your life.

It would also rob us of a lot of important insights. Anons can be funnier and more informative than any opinion commentator. As I also wrote, “One of the most effective tools that unfashionable, contrarian and dissident voices have in opposing [the] complacent status quo is mocking and dissecting its absurdities online.”

Granted, anons can be a problem — saying false or hurtful things they would not say under their real identities. Where this spills into actual incitement or harassment, they should be unmasked. 

Yet I cannot help suspecting that politicians — and my fellow journalists — are so offended at being called stupid and ugly by anonymous people that they blow them up into a bigger societal pathology than they actually are. Faceless and shapeless, they also make a convenient sinister foe. 

But that does not make the case against them valid. I can understand why advocates of left-wing orthodoxies would want them prohibited. I don’t think right-leaning people have any excuse.