On general principles, I support Internet anonymity and look askance at people's efforts to "out" or "dox" anonymous Web commenters whose views they disagree with, much less for simple sport. As a mostly retired, mostly anonymous political blogger during the Bush years, I saw "outing" wars up close. It was rare, at least in my corner of the Internet, that the public exposure of an individual who wanted to opine but for whatever reason didn't feel comfortable doing so with their real name, much less with their home address splashed across the Internet, was warranted.

I think legislative attempts to somehow ban Internet anonymity are misguided at best and in some cases, outright assaults on free and open political discourse. I think whistleblowers play a hugely important role in countering the worst corporate and government excesses. And I absolutely bristle when somebody who uses his real identity online bashes anonymous critics as "cowards" without any acknowledgement that there are legitimate reasons why some folks must post anonymously, often tied to their livelihoods, not to mention that anonymous political commentary had a fundamental role in the founding of this country in the first place.

But I still think Violentacrez deserved to be outed, doxed, and hung out on a virtual clothesline for everybody to see, including the bosses whom he says fired him less than 24 hours after his identity was exposed by Gawker.

I know, I know  not exactly a bold position to take, given the loathsomeness of the fellow in question. Yet Violentacrez, the self-proclaimed "creepy uncle of Reddit" and "biggest troll on the Internet," has a shocking number of defenders who somehow think he is the victim in this instance.

If you don't know about Violentacrez, here's the deal. He's a long-time contributor, moderator, and highly influential "poweruser" on Reddit, the popular Web destination that calls itself "the front page of the Internet"  and has the daily traffic to back up that boast. As a Reddit mod, Violentacrez created and oversaw "subreddit" sections of the site that delve into some of the most vile, albeit technically legal according to him, territory you'll find on the Net, all behind the shield of "free speech." These are places where misogyny, rape, incest, violence against women, "griefing" parents of dead children, and racism are celebrated, where pictures of underage girls are posted without their knowledge. This is the underbelly of the Internet, where creeps encourage each other to push the envelope further and further, for example, with photos snapped of women without their knowledge  known as "creepshots"  then posted on a Reddit for users to perv over.

Violentacrez built up quite a reputation for himself over the years and was apparently even valued by Reddit's small management team for his ability to police and manage his subreddits with dedication and competency. After Reddit shut down Violentacrez's "jailbait" board in the wake of a public outcry, Gawker's Adrian Chen decided to track down this individual and find out who he really was.

Turns out he's a white, overweight, 49-year-old computer programmer at a financial firm in Texas named Michael Brutsch (as one Gawker commenter wryly noted about those biographical details, "of course he is.")

Chen published his lengthy biography of Brutsch/Violentacrez last Friday. But even prior to doing so, word had reached Reddit users that Gawker was planning to out one of their own. Some of them blew a gasket. Some of Reddit's mods issued a blanket ban on all links to Gawker on their subreddits, as the Guardian noted. The rationale, other than a defense of one of their own, was that Chen's outing of Violentacrez was an "anti-free speech" endeavor. What's more, as Brutsch himself sputtered on the phone, in Chen's telling, "It's not like I do anything illegal."

This is ludicrous. And again, I say this as someone who strongly defends Internet anonymity and has in the past scrubbed comment threads I've moderated of people's street addresses and other personal information posted by their trollish opponents to expose them.

The two main strains of defense for Violentacrez  outing people on the Internet is a nasty business and privacy should be respected as long as folks aren't doing anything illegal  absolutely hold water, in my view. They're both good rules of thumb for Internet life. But Michael Brutsch and his Reddit pals were themselves walking up to the very edge of those maxims, leaping over to the other side, and now have the audacity to complain that Gawker didn't play by the rules they themselves revel in breaking.

This isn't very complicated. Posting pictures of people without their knowledge is both an invasion of their privacy and a form of outing them to the Internet. Doing so may be protected speech, but it doesn't mean it's good speech, or speech that shouldn't be shamed from the hilltops as an exercise of one's own free speech. What's more, Adrian Chen himself didn't "do anything illegal" by exposing Michael Brutsch (and yes, Redditors didn't do anything illegal by blocking Gawker links, etc., etc.  the Ferris Wheel can go round and round, but at some point we have to get off and take a stand for something, I think).

If you live by the sword of exposing strangers to ridicule, contempt, and objectification on the Internet, it's pretty rich when you throw a hissy fit when the other side of that blade swings your way.

But there's also a third and fourth line of defense for Brutsch/Violentacrez, the first of which is that he and others like him are actually instrumental to protecting free speech by pushing its limits to the extent they do. But rather than making them modern-day Voltaires (actually Evelyn Beatrice Halls, but why quibble), Reddit apologists for Brutsch who hew this line but claim to dislike his online activity ignore a crucial point  that disapproving of "creepshots" and "picsofdeadkids" entails a little bit more than merely defending his right to post them. Some Redditors, of course, did do more. They're the ones who spearheaded the movement to dump Brutsch's "jailbait" board in the first place.

Those who stood idly by while "jailbait" was going strong and now want to kill Gawker's messenger are, as Chen noted, expressing twisted "Reddit logic," the notion that "outing Violentacrez is worse than anonymously posting creepshots of innocent women, because doing so would undermine Reddit's role as a safe place for people to anonymously post creepshots of innocent women."

The last refuge of Violentacrez and his supporters is the claim that upsetting people's sensitivities via trolling is socially valuable in that it breaks down cultural taboos and pierces the grim veil of political correctness. Perhaps, in some instances. Trolls come in many shapes and forms, some much more aware of the subversive nature of their activities than others, as explained quite well by Whitney Phillips over at The Atlantic.

Well, there's a difference between rick-rolling someone, disrupting the flow of an online conversation, or even pointing them to goatse, and actively invading people's privacy IRL. There's a difference between using anonymity to speak more freely than you otherwise could and using it to bully, smear, and slut shame others.

Or to cause them to lost their jobs. There's a delicious irony to the "Internet's biggest troll" getting trolled so very hard himself. Who knows, maybe Adrian Chen just did it for the lulz.