Anonymity and the Expression of Face on Facebook
This paper shows how the anonymity of person does not necessarily guarantee the anonymity of information/content, and how matters relating to the threat to one’s face can emerge in such instances. To achieve this, twenty posts were purposively sampled from Rant HQ, a Facebook domain. Rants that were specifically tagged “anonymous” were analysed using Trepete’s (2020) Social Media Privacy Model and Brown and Levinson’s (1987) Theory of Politeness. Findings reveal that most of the anonymous posts contain personal issues that border on marriage, sex, relationships and different forms of negative addictions. The paper concludes that hiding one’s physical identity does not immune one from the effect that the content of a message can have on their face because senders of these anonymous messages took actions capable of constituting a threat to their own face. It is recommended that matters of sensitive nature should be treated in close quarters by people who have the best interests of the senders at heart like close friends and family members, and not in a public domain like Facebook.
Keywords: anonymity, expression, face, facebook