A friend of mine would like to post an op-ed style political essay about the current turmoil in the Democratic Party about Biden’s fitness. They are concerned about it affecting their career, should it be linked back to them; the US is highly divided and they know some of their peers are Republicans, and they’re not sure about the affiliations of people in their upward chain of command. My friend is concerned that posting an emotional opinion piece might – if attributed to them and seen – negatively affect their career. They want to stay anonynmous.

I think getting something posted anonymously in Lemmy would be fairly easy; no-one is going to trying legally coercing an email out of a Lemmy instance over an op-ed. And getting a boost in Mastodon would be simple. I was hoping that there’d be something like WriteFreely where they could post, but anonymity appears to be not even a consideration by the main developers.

And then there’s the question of how to get links to the essay out of the Fediverse, where 90% of the people are. I don’t have a Xitter account anymore, and have never had a Facebook account.

What suggestions does Lemmy have? How, in today’s world, does someone anonymously post content?

Subscript: I do not mean political anonymity – not in the way that protection from law enforcement is needed. My friend lives in the US where freedom of speech is still more-or-less ensured, and the content is not illegal, incidiary, inciting, or even unusual. However, they want anonymity sufficient to guard against data miners, correlators, and brokers. They need to get something off their chest, express an opinion, but not at a risk to their career.

  • hendrikEnglish
    1•5 months ago

    Hmmh, I’m still not sure what they’re trying to do. Generally speaking, something like a VPN will give some anonymity. Not total, I mean they also regularly catch some criminals, whistleblowers etc. But the tools need to fit the use-case. If it’s super important, leak it to some investigative journalist with some good reputation. And they’ll take care.

    If doing it oneself, most important thing is not to re-use things that could be traced back. Use a different internet connection just for this, make all new accounts and new email addresses and don’t use them after that for anything else. There are live Linux distributions like Tails which will be a blank slate and not have any cookies or stuff from your other accounts stored on them.

    There are different levels and possible tradeoffs. Not using your internet connection and creating a new blog account somewhere might be enough.

    I don’t see any good way to reach lots of people over social media… They can send it to someone, anonymously, and hope they re-post it. But there is no way to use own accounts or friends’ accounts with already existing followers. At least not without compromising anonymity.