>The opposite. In Western society there is a focus on "being yourself"
You're right. But that demand to be yourself is based on making a distinction between a true inner self and a false public persona. Its usually accepted that we have to put up a public face for professional reasons, but we're also told to be our authentic selves too. Seeing things in terms of Western individualism vs Asian collectivism is misguided. Yes, there are differences between America and Japan but both are liberal democratic states with liberal legal systems where the individual is taken to be the basic unit of society. If you look at American and Japanese pop culture, you'll see a "be your self" attitude everywhere. So you're right that it has very little to do with it. I use the "Western individualism" because I think this type of individualism has a Western history, in the Protestant Reformation, before it globalized.
I brought up individualism because I think its the cultural context that shaped the design of computers and the internet. In the 90s and 2000s, it was really believed that the internet would be a tool of freedom. It would allow people to express their true self without the masks they wear in public and without the budrens of a physical body with biological limits. As this technology has taken over more aspects of life, everything from shopping to sex, we experience less physical connection and more lonliness. We can't just turn the machine off and go outside because virtually everything is online now. The internet created mass social isolation and we wind up trying to solve this by reaching out over the internet. There's a tendency out there that says society was bad and we use the internet as an escape. This is only half true. We designed the internet to serve an ideological end and its created social problems that drive more chronic internet addiction.
>anonymity allows people to do what they would never do under their real identity, and the more they feed their base desires, the more corrupt they become.
This. The internet seperates personalities from bodies, from a body that can feel pain. We end up being more insensitive and numb to other's suffering. Its also why the internet is filled with hate speech, slander, and witchhunts which are then justified by the extreme libertarian culture of the internet.