Facebook Wants You To Snitch On Friends Not Using Their Real Name

http://paulbernal.wordpress.com/2012/09/21/facebook-snitchgate/

by mindstab • 14 years ago

218 156 14 years ago

paulbernal.wordpress.com

rsync• 14 years ago

I was going to say that I can't believe Salman Rushdie stooped so low as to mail a copy of his passport to some website.

But it's harder to believe that he had a facebook account in the first place.

unabridged• 14 years ago

why? the man loves attention, haven't you seen his twitter account: http://twitter.com/SalmanRushdie

Karunamon10• 14 years ago

FTA: Indeed, under the terms of the Snoopers Charter, it wouldn’t just be Facebook who could access this kind of information: the authorities could potentially set up a filter to gather data on people who don’t confirm the names of their friends

Yes, and I could potentially sprout wings from my ass and become a travel carrier. The rest of this article is nothing more than a ton of thinly veiled fallacies, slippery slope and appeal to emotion the least of the two.

Is the feature dodgy? Perhaps.

Did you agree to the rules of the party before joining? Yup. One of which is: "Use your real name".

Should you be surprised if you get called out on it? Nope.

You're more than welcome to protest unfair policies (whether saying you'll put truthful info on a form is "unfair" is left as an exercise to the reader), but much like civil disobedience, you have no right to complain once you are found to be breaking the law/policy and are punished for it.

This is a website. Let's try to keep perspective here.

law• 14 years ago

> Did you agree to the rules of the party before joining? Yup. One of which is: "Use your real name".

I signed up for Facebook in September 2004. I most certainly did not agree to that rule, because as far as I can recall, no such rule existed at the time. You may make the argument that my continued use of their service implies assent to any subsequent modifications to their terms of service, but that's an issue that would need to be litigated.

tedunangst• 14 years ago

Unless you had some agreement in place that the original tos was perpetual, I don't think you can do much about updated terms.

yafujifide• 14 years ago

What's a "real" name? The one on record with the government? What if no on calls me by that name?

asr• 14 years ago

Agree with your larger point, but your tone is a bit argumentative.

Also, civil disobedience doesn't mean what you think it means:

  much like civil disobedience, you have no right to complain once
  you are found to be breaking the law/policy and are punished for it

Civil disobedience is all about breaking the law in order to maintain the right to complain. "Under a government which imprisons unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison." http://www.gutenberg.org/files/71/71-h/71-h.htm

Karunamon10• 14 years ago

It's argumentative because poorly constructed appeals to emotion usually have the opposite effect on me.

Anyways, by the comment about civil disobedience, I meant that, if you willfully break a law you feel to be unjust, what comes with that is a reasonable expectation of the punishment for breaking that law to be meted out.

I see it kind of like a button that says "By clicking okay, you will be punched in the face". The people that click okay don't have any reason to complain, they were warned.

Replace "punched in the face" with any possibly negative thing. If you are told that X will happen if you do Y, and you do Y, and X happens, don't complain.

quesera5• 14 years ago

This is not a website. This is a massive web of communications, past and present. This is not a wire tap without a permit, this is a permanent archive of every sniffle. Guys with warrants and/or guns get what they want, and Facebook has what they want.

Does Mark Zuckerburg strike you as the kind of fella who will go to prison to fight for your privacy?

Karunamon10• 14 years ago

This is not a wire tap without a permit, this is a permanent archive of every sniffle

Uploaded willfully by the people concerned. What is hard to understand about "don't put something online you don't want others to have access to"? (Values of "others" change with the service involved.. but you'd have to be frankly, moronic to put something on a social network site and not expect it to be accessible to others, as well as authorities if they come knocking)

fleitz2• 14 years ago

What is a "real" name vs. one that is not "real"?

Did you mean legal name? And if so does that exclude legal aliases?

What about Madonna, is that her 'real' name?

joezydeco• 14 years ago

Um, yeah.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madonna_Louise_Ciccone

Karunamon10• 14 years ago

Are you called "fleitz" in real life? No? That is not your real name then. It is a pseudonym.

This isn't rocket science.

cpeterso• 14 years ago

Apparently the name "Madonna" is real enough for Facebook (though they probably have exemptions for famous people).

https://www.facebook.com/madonna

jerf• 14 years ago

"The rest of this article is nothing more than a ton of thinly veiled fallacies, slippery slope and appeal to emotion the least of the two."

I agree, and it's a pity that's the route chosen, because the point about what kind of atmosphere it creates is enough to carry the argument. It isn't hard to emotionally read that dialog as "Please select who you are more loyal to: A. Facebook B. Your friend C. I just can't decide! D. Why are you asking‽"

I can't imagine that in the longterm this is a gain for Facebook, even if they somehow squeeze a short-term bounce out of this.

(Though I can't help but feel that both the advertisers and Facebook may be overestimating the value of "really" reaching the real "people" they think they are. So very, very much behaviour information leaks into every minute of interaction with Facebook regardless of whether you are in your "real" account or not that I bet the ad algorithms still mostly work even on the "fake" accounts.)

clobber3• 14 years ago

The problem is that it has turned into more than a website now where people get denied jobs for not being a member (see my previous comment in this thread). This is wrong.

civilian3• 14 years ago

I'm a rational anarchist. Make all the laws (and policies) you want, and I'll follow the ones I like.

thenomad2• 14 years ago

So, just to confirm here - you don't think there's anything wrong with your friends being encouraged to anonymously betray your trust by giving information to a third party that may cause you social and emotional harm?

(And records of whether that information was given subsequently being recorded.)

The article's points on "snitching" seemed sound to me. Encouraging people to inform on one another and betray trust is generally societally harmful.

jedbrown• 14 years ago

If the responses are actually anonymous (as they claim, but I don't believe it's actually anonymous in their database), it would be easy to generate enough false positives to spoil the system.

quesera5• 14 years ago

There is a 0% chance that Facebook does not record your response to every request.

latimer• 14 years ago

If it turns out it isn't anonymous and they are shutting down accounts over it, can there be any repercussions for them lying like that or is it just "unethical"?

qwertzlcoatl• 14 years ago

I personally had my name in Russian letters, so that it resembled my real name with symbols. Facebook got aware of this and blocked my account and forced me to upload a scan of my ID card. After a heavy dispute because I was not willing to hand out my ID to a foreign company (and various other reasons) I gave into their request, uploading a fake ID of me with fake data.

tyrmored• 14 years ago

If nothing else this might help put the kibosh on the intensely annoying way Facebook users tend to use cutesy fake names so that you don't know who the hell they are when they comment on your posts.

Evbn2• 14 years ago

Or you could unfriend people you don't like to hang out with on Facebook.

michaelhoffman• 14 years ago

I'd rather have Facebook fix the problem.

jrtashjian2• 14 years ago

The only problem with forcing real names that I've recently encountered are family members who work in prisons. They use a modified name as to make it difficult for an inmate to gain knowledge of them and where they live. Personal and family protection in a way with the ability to still use Facebook to connect with distant friends and family members.

Anyone else run into this instance?

maxerickson• 14 years ago

It seems like it would be more sensible for them to use modified names inside the prison.

Of course, they probably don't get to choose what name to use in the prison.

w1ntermute2• 14 years ago

Seems to me that guards using fake names should be a matter of course in prisons.

qq66• 14 years ago

I think that both guards and inmates should be assigned fake names in prison, or addressed simply by number, to avoid prison interactions spilling out of the prison and affecting prisoners' families etc. Of course, the danger with this is that abuses within prison would become harder to track and account for.

quesera5• 14 years ago

That's a good example, but there are countless reasons why people cannot safely use their legal names in places like Facebook.

They can elect not to participate, and Facebook can elect to prohibit them.

Neither party really suffers any material damage, but it does frustrate some decent people.

AJ007• 14 years ago

I'd argue that people do suffer material damage by being blocked from using Facebook.

protomyth2• 14 years ago

Sadly, safety concerns are not a concern of advertisers or the CFO.

brackin• 14 years ago

They'd love a database full of confirmed names, which advertisers could buy into. With Facebook the '900m users' are all real people not just accounts created.

w1ntermute2• 14 years ago

This could be a good way to hasten the departure of users from Facebook. If you get the accounts of all your friends using fake names suspended, they might be more willing to move to Google Plus.

notatoad• 14 years ago

It might hasten the departure of users from Facebook, but if they're leaving because of facebook's real name policy, I doubt they're going to find G+ more attractive.

Smudge3• 14 years ago

Enforcing real names has pros and cons. For Facebook as a business, the pros certainly outweigh the value lost when accounts can't be mapped directly to real people. Names are a key part of that mapping.

In general, I prefer an option for pseudonymity, because it is much more inclusive (allowing certain people at the fringes to feel more comfortable joining in -- victims of abuse, political dissidents, etc), and is much less messy than total anonymity (which wouldn't really work for something like Facebook, not that there isn't a place for it elsewhere on the web). That said, pseudonymity can still get messy, so I see why Facebook might want to keep it in check.

One can also make the argument that the level of discourse is much higher on services where people are more personally accountable for what they say, and where confusing or offensive usernames don't get in the way of conversations. But I would say that the actual level of discourse sometimes found on Facebook throws that argument into question.

nodemaker• 14 years ago

Based on the level of discourse here on hacker news and even on reddit, I don't think one can reasonably say that.

Smudge3• 14 years ago

I don't personally agree with the argument, but I've seen it come up numerous times, first on Google Plus and now on Facebook.

andreasvc• 14 years ago

Indeed, it seems much more sensible to directly do Q/A on messages, instead of on the names being used. I think the argument simply confuses a correlation with causation.

prodigal_erik3• 14 years ago

What Facebook and Google+ gain in politesse, they lose in depth and honesty. I can't assume I'll be held "accountable" in a just way by every prospective employer, apartment manager, or lover I'll ever meet, so these venues get empty pleasantries from me, certainly nothing controversial in any way.

psbp4• 14 years ago

Now imagine a whole generation socializing under these artificial restrictions. Can you imagine how stifling being raised under an umbrella of constant surveillance by your peer group, family, future employers and advertisers would be to your personality and relationships? We're developing a society of sociopatic egotists.

yuhong• 14 years ago

Personally as I said before I do not advocate real name policies, but I am for fixing such problems if possible. For example, the illusion that people are perfect is obsolete in this day and age.

Karunamon10• 14 years ago

>so these venues get empty pleasantries from me, certainly nothing controversial in any way.

Is nobody familiar with the privacy settings? Facebook has lists, G+ has circles. One for family, one for acquaintances, one for close friends, one for business. Guess who gets to see the pictures from the house party and who doesn't?

psbp4• 14 years ago

So is facebook meant to be a service for your close friends and family or a broader social network that promotes businesses, news, celebrities; a wider discussion? If it wants to be both, there are only cons. You can't conflate personal relationships with media discussions and advertising. This is why facebook is ultimately a doomed prospect (either socially and/or financially). It's either successful as a true social network, or it's an ad/personal information scam.

fauigerzigerk2• 14 years ago

Real names policies are questionable but debatable. Asking friends to report friends to some authority reveals utter contempt for the very personal relationships that Facebook supposedly thrives on.

Digit-Al• 14 years ago

Absolutely. I think that everyone who receives one of these questionnaires should select "I don't want to answer". If the majority answer that it becomes meaningless.

idunno246• 14 years ago

I always wondered why google+ got all that bad press and facebook didn't for real names

fl3tch3• 14 years ago

I'm guessing it's because a culture and expectation of using real names had already been established on Facebook by the time the masses arrived, while privacy-conscious techies were the first G+ users.

at-fates-hands• 14 years ago

Wrot wrow, the gig might be up for myself. Hopefully none of my HS friends will out me. If so, I'm going to have to close my account.

Not that I use a lot anyways. . .

mkjones• 14 years ago

Hey folks - I work on the Site Integrity team at Facebook. We work to keep people safe from scams, spam, fake accounts, and having their account taken over.

We're always looking for ways to better understand how people represent themselves online and improve the design of our service. We look at the results of this kind of experiment in aggregate - the responses doesn't have any impact on the user account or that of their friends.

joe_the_user• 14 years ago

1) The idea of people giving out information about their friends to an anonymous entity such as Facebook is going to result in a considerable increase in paranoia no matter what you say.

2) The claim that real identities result in either greater safety or greater civility has been debunked here quite a number of times here. After all, probably the largest number of people who are using pseudonyms are doing so out of a desire for safety.

psbp4• 14 years ago

Then why the other three options? Why not just "I don't know this person" or "Ignore this message"?

marshray• 14 years ago

That doesn't mean what you're doing is not inherently sociopathic.

cantbecool• 14 years ago

I sure hope your response is authentic. You might not use that information now, but you may potentially at a later date, i.e., warn a user to use their real name and if not you're account is suspended until doing so. Facebook's in the information business and now that you're a publicly traded company, the higher ups want to look good on the balance sheet and search is your organizations next step. This seems like a slippery slope to me.

steve8918• 14 years ago

The best way people, especially kids, have to protect their future selves from things they write or post today, is by assuming a fake identity.

Kids are quickly learning that everything on the Internet is forever. Take the option of hiding their identity away from them, and I think they will move to a service that will allow this.

genwin2• 14 years ago

My kids are sick of me harping on this. But now they use different pseudonyms for every site, including Facebook, and I'm proud of them for it.

They rarely use Facebook anymore; it seems it's becoming boring.

ThaddeusQuay2• 14 years ago

Why are you deleting accounts of people who cosplay? It's mostly kids having fun playing dress up and taking photos and making plans to appear at conventions, all while calling themselves by anime-inspired names. When these kids lose their accounts, they also lose their connections with each other, connections which they spent a great deal of time and energy cultivating, and what's even worse is that it's difficult for them to reconnect, after creating new accounts with their real names, because they know each other only by their cosplay names. It's a nonsensical policy, which does little-to-nothing to keep these kids safe, and which rather effectively kills existing social circles.

example: http://japanimeclarinetist.deviantart.com/journal/They-delet...

article: http://dailydot.com/news/facebook-purges-cosplay-accounts (Facebook Purges Cosplay Accounts)(08/21/12)

VeejayRampay2• 14 years ago

Right. You're absolutely NOT trying to put a name on everyone to make more money. Absolutely not. It's all for the users, as one would expect from such a pro-bono, for-the-greater-good company such as Facebook.

egypturnash• 14 years ago

As someone who had the promise of Google Plus completely ruined when the nymwars chased my largely-pseudonymous-on-the-Internet circles away, I plan to be either consistently lying when presented with this "is this their real name?" dialogue box, or simply rolling a die to choose my answer.

garethsprice• 14 years ago

Presumably you are storing the individual submissions, even if the reports generated are aggregate.

What safeguards are in place to make sure that the information is not used in the future to target accounts for suspension?

DanBC• 14 years ago

     [mkjones]
     - I do not know this person.
     - I do not think this is a real name

anonymouz• 14 years ago

But do you store the data individually?

If, for example, you store that my profile was identified as real by a friend of mine, then you're essentially collecting personal data on me.

And I doubt that I would be informed about this fact, or be able to see it somewhere. (This assumption being based on the previous and ongoing mishandling / incomplete answering of requests under EU data protection law.)

thenomad2• 14 years ago

I don't want to be Crazy Internet Conspiracy Guy here, but I note this is a somewhat carefully worded response. mkjones did not say "We don't store the individual answers anywhere", "your answers are not recorded" or anything similar. Nor did he/she say "the data is only stored in aggregate", but "we look at the results in aggregate", which is a rather significant difference.

However, there's every chance that's just a case of bad wording. So, mkjones - can you confirm that the option the user selects on the dialog box we're discussing here ("Is this your friend's real name?") is not stored, saved or recorded in any way that could subsequently be connected to that user's account?

protomyth2• 14 years ago

First, shame on you and yours for asking people to rat on other people. Do you understand what could happen in the real world?

Next, I am a little sick of this "real name" business since Facebook and Google get it so wrong. I will give a couple of examples.

I grew up on a reservation in the US. Several of my friends have been given "Indian Names". Is that their real name or would Google / Facebook say that it's not valid because it is not a state issued ID. Is Google/Facebook combing the cultures of the world to pick out what they believe?

I do sysadmin work. Several people are named the same as parents / grandparents, but are known by other names. I use what people call them for their accounts not their official id. I would say I am right and have a better grasp of what their name is then someone who only uses official ID. Heck, would Google/Facebook take a tribal ID?

The cases of people trying to get away from a bad situation where Facebook / Google basically provides a target, not a safe place, are too numerous to iterate.

It isn't about the people using Facebook / Google. It is about your customers: the advertisers.

genwin2• 14 years ago

> We work to keep people safe...

Real name is unsafe, outside of Facebook's control. The unsafe aspects include bullying and robbery, e.g.

clobber3• 14 years ago

We're setting a really bad precedent for the future here and these sorts of things need to stop now. Unfortunately, people don't seem to want to fight this.

Now we have people getting turned down for jobs because they DON'T have a facebook account[1]. What's next?

1. http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/109ipi/no_faceboo...

Smudge3• 14 years ago

No social media presence? Clearly you are a psychopathic recluse unfit for normal work.

We only want employees who do normal things, like obsessively refreshing a particular website all day long.

eyevariety• 14 years ago

Brilliant!

clobber3• 14 years ago

Haha I love it. This stuff really is disturbing though - society is getting worse as a result.

psbp4• 14 years ago

Facebook is possibly the most dangerous social construct created. And no, it's not because privacy or information are too sacred to be utilized, but because personal identity is so easily perverted with market, institutional, societal interests.

It's not hard to imagine a near future, if not a present, in which a person's identity is entirely evaluated, shaped, and determined by a monolith such as facebook.

cynest• 14 years ago

> It's not hard to imagine a near future, if not a present, in which a person's identity is entirely evaluated, shaped, and determined by a monolith such as facebook.

I don't think this is entirely correct. I think that facebook is better described as a catalyst for those who would do the evaluating, shaping, etc.

vidarh5• 14 years ago

The question then is how long before someone creates a business around "staging" your Facebook profile to fit certain profiles.

rmc3• 14 years ago

That should be addressed by better employee rights in the USA

VeejayRampay2• 14 years ago

Everyone has people they don't like and vice versa. People that know your real name. I suspect it wouldn't too hard to crowdsource "identification" to the audience of Facebook so that they can monetize their idiotic platform better.

ivany• 14 years ago

Every time fb does something scummy, and people act surprised, I am surprised. They've proven themselves to have the morals of a used car dealer. Why would you trust them, or be surprised when they act untrustworthy?

"Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me." No?

vidarh5• 14 years ago

Used car dealers presumably have that reputation because they still manage to fool people, otherwise the immoral ones would quickly go out of business. Part of the skill is to manage to convince people that things are different with you and them.

mikiem• 14 years ago

Oh excellent. I can help those poor neutered friends stuck as half of user like "Susan N Steve Smith" because their significant other created that account.

propercoil• 14 years ago

Where is the X button? "leave me alone" ? i'm deleting my account right at this moment i had enough

denzil_correa• 14 years ago

There's a reason why people do not want to use their real names. Currently Facebook does not keep up with such promises. What has changed to make me have a leap of faith on Facebook?

ari_elle2• 14 years ago

I don't really think the connection that he tries to make between Facebook's real name policy and the need for anonymity for whistleblowers/oppressed regimes is really fair. Facebook wants to be a social portal were you feed your desire to be seen and make stupid updates about your life and contact your friends when you go out with them. I don't really think that Facebooks policies are crucial for whistleblowers :D

What should be done? Stop using Facebook. Everybody has e-mail, it's quick enough, it's fun and people tend to think before they send off an e-mail (something i miss with instant messaging).

The niveau on facebook has been hiding under the table since i don't know when and that is true for their policies and for how people use facebook, so instead of trying to force the niveau to come out, how about giving up already?

If Facebook is such an important part of one's life that even while being unhappy with their policies you can't give up on the service, then that's just sad....

brador• 14 years ago

Rumors on Reddit that employers are asking for a Facebook presence pre-interview. What then?

ari_elle2• 14 years ago

Then use it for exactly that. The point is if i use facebook for having a profile cause my employer wants me too then i can afford to (mostly) ignore facebooks policies on privacy or real name policies, because i want my real name to begin with and don't give them every crappy detail about my life... or explain to your employer why you don't use facebook and see how he reacts! I read once about some security expert who had to deny connections to hackers as part of his job and then instead of doing that explained to his employer that he is part of the hacker community and is speaking at hacker conferences etc and what he considers to be a hacker etc and it turned out to not be such a big deal as he thought in the beginning....

gaius• 14 years ago

I do not believe that for one second. As someone who has interviewed hundreds of candidates, there are many things a prospective employer really, really does not want to know. Religion, sexual orientation, veteran status, the list goes on... A company that finds out these things and rejects a candidate for any reason, even a legitimate technical one, is begging to be sued.

That is what LinkedIn is for...

fauigerzigerk2• 14 years ago

Maybe it's a kind of Milgram experiment.

tokenadult• 14 years ago

I have been on online networks of one kind or another since 1992. I am 100 percent behind the idea that people using their real names (the rule of some networks I have been on) promotes better online community and people taking more responsibility for their personal behavior in the community. That said, I do have some friends who have long established pseudonyms that have most of the good effects of real names, because those friends still try to build up reputation for those pseudonyms. (You'll have to be the judge of how well I'm doing here building up the reputation of "tokenadult," a screen name I brought here from two other online communities where pseudonyms rather than real names are mandatory but changing names is difficult so that reputation still accumulates for each name.)

That said, I refuse to "out" my niece's dog, who has a Facebook profile. It's important to have amusing counterexamples out there so that people don't invest too much trust in Facebook. In the last week or so a Hacker News participant (I don't know his real name [smile]) suggested that Facebook could monetize by being an online payments platform. For consumer-to-business transactions, I don't trust Facebook as a payment platform because its engineers have the attitude "Don't be afraid to break things," which just doesn't appeal to me for a network that handles my financial data. For user-to-user transactions, I also don't trust Facebook because I don't trust the users unless I know them in person--my Facebook community is enjoyable because it really consists of people whose real identity I know, and who know me. If I want to do business with strangers, I occasionally do that through Amazon Marketplace, but that is because Amazon has built up its own reputation for standing behind transactions there.

AFTER EDIT: Several comments in this thread are along the lines of

It's not hard to imagine a near future, if not a present, in which a person's identity is entirely evaluated, shaped, and determined by a monolith such as facebook.

But most people in the world still are largely stuck with the reputations distorted for them, before they can develop their reputations for themselves, by their family or their classmates in some small community. Facebook is LESS of a "monolith," because it is made up of hundreds of millions of users, than any small town anywhere. A lot of people find it liberating to find online communities based on shared intellectual interests (Hacker News works for this too, of course) rather than just being stuck with their current group of in-person acquaintances.

quesera5• 14 years ago

> Facebook is LESS of a "monolith," because it is made up of hundreds of millions of users, than any small town anywhere.

You inadvertently bring up a strong counter argument.

Suppose, in your small town, you are outed (rightly or wrongly) as <insert marginalized subgroup here>, and ostracized. Normally, after much introspection and reflection, you or your family could decide to move away, if the social effects were severe enough and unfixable.

With a real name policy and a permanent archive of the psychodrama, you cannot start over elsewhere without all of it following along with you, ripe for the next group of maladjusted simpletons to harrass you with. Not everyone can move to tolerant cultures, not all marginalized groups can find reliably-safe new places.

drbawb2• 14 years ago

I think this also speaks volumes about the "dangers" of using large general-purpose social networks.

Think about it for a second: if I'm ostracized (using my name or a pseudonym, it doesn't matter) from a `Club 3.14: Raspberry Pi Hackers` message board; I can find other message boards with a surplus of R-Pi hackers.

If I say something stupid on Facebook... where am I supposed to go in order to replace Facebook?

The issue with Google+ is (<-- replace with your favorite defunct social network) that it's a graveyard. (I say that facetiously; I actually use G+ and quite like the service. That being said, I can't deny that it is missing 95% or so of my Facebook friends.)

So the issue here isn't so much the ability to have pseudonyms, IMHO.

The issue is that Facebook is quickly becoming a "monolith", and that fact _combined_ with an inability to escape your ostracism via "moving" your online presence to a new identity is where the problem lies.

I feel the real problem is that Facebook is all-encompassing. They want to be _the_ platform for online community.

Therein lies the problem, if you're only allowed _one true identity_ on their platform, your baggage follows you to every sub-community _on that platform._

SideburnsOfDoom2• 14 years ago

> I am 100 percent behind the idea that people using their real names (the rule of some networks I have been on) promotes better online community

That's funny, since hard evidence for that idea is pretty thin on the ground. I really don't think it is a good idea given that it can do a lot of harm http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Who_is_harmed_by_a_%22Rea...

> That said, I do have some friends who have long established pseudonyms that have most of the good effects of real names

Which good effects of real names do long established pseudonyms lack?

Also, would you be happy to put your real name on your reply here?

mynameishere• 14 years ago

taking more responsibility for their personal behavior in the community

Non-anonymous commentary is generally skippable. Attach your name to something, and you have to be careful to the point of sterility.

ryanmolden• 14 years ago

Alternatively, anonymous commentary quite often yields shallow/knee-jerk comments and trolling. As tokenadult pointed out though, there is a difference between real name and an online handle with a reputation associated with it. People not uding real names have to build / maintain their reputation just the same, but throwing a handle away and "starting over" is obviously easier than doing the same with a real identity. Not sure if that is good or bad, likely a mix of both. Though Facebook has clear ulterior motives other than "civil discourse enforced through 'real world' reputation tarnishment".

homodragon• 14 years ago

reputation with whom

the world is not just. there is no such thing as a "good" reputation, only popularity.

you are saying that if you are popular you won't need to defend yourself with anonymity, which is kind of like the point

FellowTraveler• 14 years ago

In Mexico, bloggers are disemboweled and strung up from bridges as a warning to others, by cartels.

In Syria, government snipers murdered bloggers to silence them.

In China, bloggers are imprisoned at hard labor.

In the United States, the Federalist Papers were released anonymously in order to protect the lives of their authors.

It is only the spoiled, rich and free countries who make such naive and irresponsible statements such as, "I am in support of people using their real names online."

A better question is, what actions are Google, Apple, and Facebook taking to protect our vital ability to remain anonymous online?

v0cab• 14 years ago

Great post. I am in South Korea. I could be imprisoned for the the things I have written here about Samsung and their owning family.

luriel• 14 years ago

In Thailand you could be imprisoned if anything you say can be misconstrued as a criticism of the King.

This kinds of laws that make all kinds of utterly harmless speech a very serious risk are very widespread.

See also what happened to some poor guy that made a joke in Twitter about his trip to the US.

People in favor of "Real Names" are the same kind of people who say "If you have nothing to hide, why do you care about privacy?"

starpilot• 14 years ago

…but you haven't.

minikites2• 14 years ago

Wouldn't an even better question be: how do we build the kind of society where people can express their thoughts attached to their names without fear of reprisal?

aes256• 14 years ago

The way forward, in my view, is not acceptance, but a complete separation of individuals and ideas.

SideburnsOfDoom2• 14 years ago

Yes, but that's going to take 100+ years. It's is not an argument in favour of real names only, today.

kstenerud2• 14 years ago

A noble sentiment, but until it can be proven with solid evidence that such a thing is possible, it would be dangerous and irresponsible to force such an experiment upon people.

History is rife with examples of people imposing what they just KNEW was right upon others, with disastrous consequences.

prodigal_erik3• 14 years ago

It's an appealing idea but I don't believe we're wired for it. "Busybody" and "judgmental" and "heretic" have been in the lexicon for many centuries. We evolved in tribes and villages which were too hierarchical and interdependent to tolerate freethinkers and too small (below Dunbar's number) for eccentrics to escape notice. It's the relative anonymity of cities, and the opportunity to reinvent oneself, that unleashed the rate of progress we see today.

ams6110• 14 years ago

These are valid points. But there are myriad ways to blog anonymously. If Facebook wants to be a place where people are known by their real names, then that's their business.

pasbesoin• 14 years ago

Time to call it: Jumped the shark.

Is there anything more "anti-social" they could have done? Betrayal. Or... maybe they're just trying to make it more realistically social?

Seriously, it's another instance of not listening to your users. Strong-arming only works as long as you are strong...

Meist• 14 years ago

I work with Matt at Facebook and wanted to reaffirm his comment below. This survey was a small anonymous test designed to improve the systems we use to keep the site safe for everyone. And, we have already confirmed that the responses collected will have zero impact on people's accounts.

We believe a real name culture is core to our mission of making the world more connected and helps us to provide the best possible experience for our users.

PS One thing I did want to note is that we offer Pages where the individual admins are not listed and have been effectively used in the past by a wide variety of groups, movements, brands, and individuals.

fudged71• 14 years ago

This is really bad.

A lot of educators aren't allowed using their real names on social networks.

Facebook Wants You To Snitch On Friends Not Using Their Real Name

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