Why are participants of online discourse so unafraid to disregard the social norms of conversation? This phenomenon extends not only to the infamous gaming forums and multiplayer chatrooms filled with every pejorative one could think of; it occurs anywhere on the internet where people publicly interact. The cause of this is one of the guiding principles on which the whole internet is built: anonymity, and the consequence of having no consequences. "Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth". This oft-quoted statement is attributed to poet Oscar Wilde in his 1891 essay "The Critic as Artist". Wilde, who died almost 90 years before the invention of the World Wide Web, could not have known how the system would prove how right he was. A core tenet of online discourse, anonymity allows participants and bystanders alike to feel secure in their facelessness. This makes the internet free and unobstructed, but as a consequence, makes the internet, well, free and unobstructed. Anonymous accounts are not bound by the filtering of in-person social interaction because their identity is not known to their interlocutors, and as such, there is no real-world consequence or retribution for what they say outside of a mere censor or content warning. Gaming forums and especially the open-voice "lobbies" of multiplayer games often lack any meaningful form of censorship, causing many children to experience the diverse world of hate speech and vocal taboos from an increasingly younger age. Further than the realm of video games (though they are not exempt), online political discourse is often rife with opinions and claims that drastically divert from social norms, prejudice-filled statements written from behind the safety of a keyboard, or spoken from a microphone. Many things discussed on the internet would not bode well for the speakers if introduced to common talk, and the faux pas in which one forgets they are "not on the internet anymore" and use internet-reserved speech in an in-person conversation has caused (often physical) conflict since the advent of the chatroom. The effects of this phenomenon on real-life social interaction do not stop there. Children exposed to internet culture in its "unfiltered" state form an obscene vocabulary far before was expected in previous decades. Adolescents who engage in propagandized, politically-extreme content directed towards those of impressionable age are more likely to develop certain ideologies early on and face the consequences of this radical progression - a phenomenon many call "the pipeline" - because they lack the social maturity to realize said opinions may be less warmly received outside of the anonymous echo chambers of the internet. A "solution" to this can hardly be obtained without the obstruction of privacy in the internet medium, or by censorship that may devolve into bias and information control. As information can be transmitted across the world near-instantly without being traced, the atmosphere of civil discourse is irrevocably changed, and children will continue to be "educated" earlier in less savory subjects without much that can be done from the outside. Modern internet culture thus emphasizes the role of the parent(s) and its importance in guiding a child's development into a responsible adult. As a gaming-liable child with mostly unrestricted internet access, my ignorance was quickly diminished. My parents knew this and that it could be scarcely remediated, but were determined to instill upon me an ethic of open-mindedness and basic human decency. Gaming forum and Twitter feed notwithstanding, I continue to maintain ideological moderation to this day, and my social ability remains thankfully unaffected because of their discipline.