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Yesterday, as I browsed my YouTube account after a long absence, I noticed that all responses to my comments had something in common: they were all insults! And the nature of the video didn’t make any difference, since my comments were on topics as diverse as freedom of religion and Lady Gaga. And I am not alone as a target of negativity on this website.

Since anonymous platforms allow people on the Internet to communicate without filters, they have become a place where we can say anything without perceived consequences. This makes me wonder how useful monitoring these platforms is for companies or individuals that use the website as a marketing tool. I am a big fan of Ted talks (if you haven’t seen them yet, go to Ted.com), and I’m baffled by the comment discrepancy between YouTube and the Ted website, the exact same talk generates very hateful comments on YouTube, an anonymous platform, and educated discussions on Ted. Is the audience different? I doubt it, the issue seems to be the platform. The motivation behind this excessively aggressive and disrespectful behavior seems to be diverse: a cyber-bully recently rationalized his actions by saying that it was a social experiment; and at the same time there are trolls on Twitter that have taken it as their job to take trending topics as an opportunity to spam and bring attention to themselves as a group. It doesn’t matter what the reason is, it seems like the rule of thumb is the more anonymity, the more aggressiveness and disrespect. Does this mean that we should just disregard platforms that offer anonymity? Not necessarily, the comments found there can be useful if taken with a grain of salt and such platforms can be a great source for quantitative indicators, such as exposure to the brand and top of mind through measures such as number of views on You Tube, of Re-tweets and followers on Twitter of comments on boards, etc.