In online world, a new generation of protesters chooses anonymity

Over the last week, Fabiola, a sophomore at Columbia, joined an encampment on her university’s quad, risked suspension and disrupted campus life, all in an effort to draw attention to the Palestinian cause. She describes stopping Israel’s deadly siege of Gaza as a moral duty — an urgent imperative around which she has reoriented her life.

But as she participated in one of the most visible protests on the planet last week, Fabiola decided to hold one very important thing back: her identity. Thinking of her international student visa, she stretched a black surgical mask over her face, and declined to share her full name. It was no one-off. On campuses from New England to Southern California, students leading one of the largest protest movements in decades have increasingly strapped on face masks and checkered Palestinian kaffiyehs in a polarizing bid to protect their anonymity even as they demand universities and governments be held to account. The choice represents a sharp break by many, though not all, of these students from earlier generations of university activists, who gained their moral force in part by putting their words on record and their futures in jeopardy for a larger cause. But as they actively invoke the legacy of antiwar movement of the 1960s and its successors, today’s young activists appear to be responding to a much more contemporary set of reputational and economic risks their predecessors simply did not face.

In interviews, a dozen student demonstrators across the country cited the risk of being doxxed by pro-Israel groups accusing them of antisemitism, featured by news media or captured in viral videos. Several were intimately familiar with the torrent of online harassment, rescinded job offers and death threats that can follow. Many students will accumulate large debt burdens that were virtually unheard of half a century ago. Campuses that were once mostly occupied by white men are now home to a broad range of ethnic minority groups and international students studying on visas. “If I give my name, I lose my future,” one Northwestern student explained bluntly, as he demonstrated in a kaffiyeh and asked for anonymity. And yet, on campuses already rife with tension over the Israel-Hamas war, sympathy only goes so far among fellow students and university leaders trying to restore order. The presence of large groups of masked demonstrators also appears to be contributing to a growing sense of unease at schools like Columbia and the University of California, Los Angeles, which overnight on Tuesday looked more like conflict zones than institutions in the middle of final exams.