On Feb. 17, on an anonymity-based application “Blind”, a user known to be a Kakao employee posted a complaint about suffering from bullying in the workplace, along with the title “my will” which implied his desire to commit suicide. The victim posted his feelings online since no action had been taken by Kakao even though he had reported the violence to the company. As complaints on Kakao’s violence against its employees increased on Blind, Kakao apologized and announced it would solve the problem.
Anonymity-based applications are drawing attention as a new platform for solving problems within organizations such as universities and companies. Everytime and Blind are the most popular. Everytime is an online community for university students where undergraduates, graduates, and at times professors talk about lectures, research, school life, and career. Blind is an online community for office workers who wish to communicate with employees within the same company or with workers in the same industry. What anonymity-based applications have in common is that members of organizations can share opinions on sensitive topics that may be disadvantageous to them when they raise their opinions with their real names.
Anonymity-based applications rapidly grew by solving the traditional problem that arose from the hierarchical structure of organizations. The two main advantages are the protection of personal information and certification of members of organizations. Since all posts are uploaded anonymously, they are treated fairly as the status of the users cannot influence the readers’ thoughts on the text. In addition, compared to previous online communities where users were not identified, members of organizations are certified through employee ID cards, student ID cards, and acceptance certificates, thereby increasing the platforms’ reliability.
Anonymity-based applications solve problems in organizations and contribute greatly to improving members’ satisfaction. In particular, anonymity-based applications are helpful communication channels for victims of violence to express their hardship within universities and companies.
However, anonymity-based applications are not flawless. As anonymity is guaranteed, some users express aggressive or false opinions. Gender discrimination, unreasonable criticism, prostitution, and false information are problems that Everytime users constantly complain about. There also exists a risk of manipulating public opinion because one can repeatedly post multiple posts on the same topic pretending to be different users.
Moreover, punishment in anonymity-based applications is often difficult. In Blind, for example, it is almost impossible to find users who have written problematic articles because both the headquarters and servers are in the U.S. and the servers do not store user information.
Nowadays, due to the need for addressing violence and irrationality has become more emphasized, anonymity-based applications have become an essential factor in solving problems in organizations where troubles are hard to be dealt with internally. However, users should always be wary of new violence and problems that make use of anonymity.
