Anonymous International . Anonymous (used as a mass noun) is a group initiating active civil disobedience and spread through the Internet while staying hidden, originating in 2003 on the imageboard 4chan, representing the concept of many online community users simultaneously existing as an anarchic, digitized global brain. It is also generally considered to be a blanket term for members of certain Internet subcultures, a way to refer to the actions of people in an environment where their actual identities are not known