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KDI 경제정보센터

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  • 경제배움
  • Economic

    Information

    and Education

    Center

한국관련자료
Anonymity and Identity Online
CEPR
2024.10.14
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.