Anonymity and Identity Online

Florian Ederer, Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham and Kyle Jensen

No 19571, CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research

Abstract: Economics Job Market Rumors (EJMR) is an online forum and clearinghouse for information on the academic job market for economists. It also includes content that is abusive, defamatory, racist, misogynistic, or otherwise “toxic.†Almost all of this content is created anonymously by contributors who receive a four-character username when posting on EJMR. Using only publicly available data we show that the statistical properties of the scheme by which these usernames were generated allows the IP addresses from which most posts were made to be determined with high probability.1 We recover 47,630 distinct IP addresses of EJMR posters and attribute them to 66.1% of the roughly 7 million posts made over the past 12 years. We geolocate posts and describe aggregated cross-sectional variation—particularly regarding toxic, misogynistic, and hate speech—across sub-forums, geographies, institutions, and IP addresses. Our analysis suggests that content on EJMR comes from all echelons of the economics profession, including, but not limited to, its elite institutions.

JEL-codes: C55 D83 D91 L86 Z13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024-10
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP19571 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:19571

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP19571

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CEPR ().