Weighty Papers: Anonymous Politics

Having come across this article on the political dimensions of Anonymous, I thought why not throw my own two cents out there. Back in December 2010 I wrote a paper about Anonymous, triggered by their retaliatory attacks against Mastercard and PayPal for denying their services to WikiLeaks. This being an assignment for my Digital Methods class at the UvA, I set about investigating the history of Anonymous by analyzing the content of the Wikipedia article about the group. In particular I looked at the nature of the operations Anonymous involved itself in, the amount of vandalism inflicted on the article (for the lulz, obviously) and the users doing the editing.

Here's a snippet:

Based on the collected information, it does seem like Anonymous has adopted more of an activist mentality lately, especially in comparison to the earlier years. While serious issues related to the Church of Scientology were dealt with as Project Chanology, cases of harassment and trolling continued as evidenced by the defacement of websites dedicated to epilepsy support and hip-hop music. The turning point seems to have been Anonymous’ involvement with the 2009 Iran election protests. Following this event, all of their actions have been related to free speech, censorship, net neutrality and the opposition of copyright enforcement. However, it must be said that their methods have remained largely the same, still revolving around the DDoS attack, and that the curious sense of humor and inside jokes remain.

You can find the article here.