Worked example · RE · Year 11
DCF: Citizenship → Online behaviour and online bullying
A secure Year 11 response from a pupil who was assigned the side against the motion and who, in the final reflection, ends up somewhere else. Show it after the debate, not before. The teaching point is the last box: the mark is for the reasoning, not for the verdict.
| The side I have been given | Against the motion — anonymous accounts should be allowed. |
|---|---|
| Ethical approach I am using | Consequences. I am arguing on who gets hurt, and how badly, under each rule. |
| Point 1 | Anonymity is load-bearing for the people with the most to lose, so removing it does its worst damage to the people it claims to protect. |
| Evidence for point 1 | Viewpoint 2 lists them: a young person questioning their sexuality, someone leaving an abusive home, a worker reporting unsafe practice. None of those people can use their legal name and stay safe. |
| Point 2 | Verified identity does not remove abuse; it relocates the risk onto the user, because it requires every platform to hold a copy of a document that can be breached. |
| Teaching I am quoting | Hillel, in the Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 31a: “That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow.” |
| How that teaching supports point 2 | It is a test you run on yourself, not a rule you impose on others. I would hate a company to hold my passport because a stranger behaved badly, so I should not vote to make that happen to everyone else. It puts the duty on my own conduct first, which is exactly where the other side wants to avoid putting it. |
| The strongest thing the other side will say | That behaviour genuinely changes when the mask comes off — pile-ons, impersonation accounts and fake giveaways are cheap to run precisely because a new anonymous account costs nothing. |
| My answer to it | Making accounts cost something is a real gain, and I accept it. But it is a gain in enforcement, and it can be bought without publishing anyone’s name — which is Viewpoint 3. |
| One concession | Platforms should be allowed to let a user filter replies to verified accounts only. That protects the person being targeted without silencing the person who needs a pseudonym. |
One approach chosen and held to, one teaching quoted with its source and then applied rather than dropped in, and the other side’s best argument stated fairly. That is the first three criteria.
Madam Chair, the motion asks us to ban anonymous accounts. I want to ask one question about it: who actually pays?
Firstly, anonymity is load-bearing. The stimulus names the people who rely on it — a young person working out their sexuality, someone getting out of an abusive house, a worker reporting an unsafe practice at work. Not one of those people can post under the name on their passport and be safe doing it. If we ban the pseudonym, they do not switch to their real name. They go silent. So a rule sold to us as protection removes, first and hardest, the protection of the people with the least power in the room.
Secondly, verification moves the risk onto us. To prove who I am, every platform I use has to hold a copy of a document — a passport, a bank record. Those databases are breached, regularly. When it happens, the company is fined and carries on trading; the person whose identity is now in circulation cannot issue themselves a new date of birth. We would be creating a permanent, valuable, national target in order to inconvenience people who can register a new account in ninety seconds anyway.
I accept the other side’s strongest point. Behaviour does change when there is a name attached, and a free new account is what makes a pile-on cheap. But that is an argument for making accounts cost something, not for publishing identities. A platform can verify me privately and keep a pseudonym in public, and let anyone switch on “replies from verified accounts only”. That gets the enforcement without the exposure.
Hillel put the test better than I can: that which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. I would hate a company to be handed my passport because a stranger was cruel. So I will not vote to hand over everyone else’s. I urge the house to oppose.
Around 290 words — the right length for two minutes. It ties the motion to named online behaviours and uses the teaching as the closing test rather than as decoration, meeting the fourth criterion.
I was given the side against the motion and I argued it, but I do not actually hold it in the form I argued. What moved me was the point about cost: a new anonymous account really is free, and that is why the same person can come back nineteen times. I no longer think “allow anonymity” and “ban anonymity” are the only options on the table, which is where I started. My honest position is Viewpoint 3 — verify privately, display a pseudonym, and let the user filter. What stops me being confident about it is the condition Viewpoint 3 admits: it only works if I trust the platform to hold that record and never sell, lose or hand it over. I do not, particularly. So I would want the record held by a regulator such as Ofcom rather than by the platform, and I would want to know what happens when the regulator is the one that gets breached.
Distinguishes the assigned case from the pupil’s own view, names the argument that changed their mind, and identifies the condition their new position depends on. This is the fifth criterion and the highest-scoring part of the sheet.