Anonymous Opening Up News Site “Your Anon News”

Anonymous are a hacktivist-come-civil-rights group that pride themselves on achieving social justice and surprisingly enough…on being anonymous. Yet their latest move is a bit of a strange one. An Indiegogo fundraiser, going by the name Jackal Anon, raised a huge $54,668 to set up a dedicated news site for anonymous. This fundraising campaign only needed $2,000 to reach its funding target and as you can see it absolutely smashed that.

Your Anonymous News (YAN) is part of Anonymous’ plan to shift away from sites like Twitter and Tumblr where it traditionally announces information. YAN will also help distribute other news in a different way from mainstream news. They claim to separate it from “political and celebrity gossip that inundates the mainstream”.

It is unclear how the mechanics of the website will work. There are a lot of questions worth pondering. Will they pay people to work for them? Or Will it be a volunteer network? How will they go about maintaining anonymity during this whole process? Will their website be resistant to hacks by other rivals?

For a group that is decentralised and verging on the anarchic it should be expected that the site will bring some pretty strong political opinions across. However, given Anonymous is a wide decentralised network I fail to see how the organisation will be able to hold a single unified front and keep the different opinions of each member organised. It sure is a challenge but one they are most definitely capable of living up to.

Some that contributed to the Indiegogo campaign were offered Coffee Mugs, T-Shirts and Hoodies as a thanks, depending on how much they donated. Anonymous is also accepting Bitcoin donations, although no gifts are offered in return for those.

What are your thoughts on Anonymous setting up a news website? Will you read it? Is it a good idea? Does it go against the Anonymous principle of being invisible and always lurking in the background? Do you think this is even the real Anonymous doing this, or someone just claiming to be them?

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