"Real Name" policies: They just don't work.

[denise]

I've been watching the debate raging around Google Plus's crackdown on "names they perceive to be insufficiently 'real'" with interest, and was really happy to see the "soft launch" of My Name Is Me, a project intending to shed light on the fact that self-chosen names are not "fake names" and that anonymity, pseudonymity, and the use of self-chosen names (I've seen some people moving to call that state "autonymity", which I like a lot) is not harmful to the health and well-being of an online service.

This is something I care about a lot. I've spent the last ten years of my life, more or less, immersed in the idea of what it takes to build a healthy online community and how to handle (and discourage) the abuses that develop. I've dealt with harassment, death threats, stalking, and a whole host of vile things people can say and do to each other online. (And I haven't been exempt, either; at least part of my decision to use my 'real name', which I don't feel any emotional connection with at all, for my work on Dreamwidth has been to help increase the positive mentions of said name on the internet and drown out the Google results from several of those harassment campaigns.)

When we decided to start Dreamwidth, I did a lot of thinking about what my ideal online community would be. Our decisions for policies, community design, etc, were sharply shaped by the existing codebase we chose to use and the design thereof, but we did make a bunch of changes while we were still in design mode in order to shape the community we wanted to take place. (Biggest example there: the split of "friend" into "I want to read you" vs "I want you to read my locked stuff", which is the #1 change I credit in the development of DW as a service where people are overwhelmingly willing to reach outside their existing social circles, make new contacts and new friendships, and seek out differing points of view and differing ideas. Which, if I haven't said it lately, is absolutely awesome.)

One thing we never, ever, ever considered, even for a moment, was instituting a "real name" policy to prevent abuses. Why? Because it doesn't fucking work.

Many of the people who caused the worst problems on LiveJournal over the years had registered with some variant on their "real" name, or had their "real" name in their profile somewhere, or were widely known under their "real" name. (I use "real" in scarequotes deliberately, because god damn it, "rahaeli" is my real name. So's "synecdochic". The entire staff I supervised at LJ, both volunteer and paid employee, called me "rahaeli" or "rah" in a professional context, to the point where half our volunteers had to think really hard to remember my name. Most of the close friends I've made through fandom refer to me as "synecdochic" or "syne". I feel desperately weird being denise on Dreamwidth.) Many of the people who caused zero problems at all were operating under a self-chosen name that had no bearing on the name assigned to them at birth.

Facebook, which has an (inconsistently-enforced) "real name" policy, has to have an abuse staff that's probably larger than their programmer staff. Dreamwidth, which lets you call yourself whatever you want, gets one or two abuse complaints a month, if that. (And before anyone starts to say it has to do with the size of the service, I'm freely willing to admit that has something to do with it. I still know that, for instance, DW has fewer abuse complaints than LJ did, when it was the same size, by at least two orders of magnitude; I was there for both. I would love to see an industry-wide analysis of "instances of abuse complaints" vs "number of staff members dedicated to handling complaints" vs "site-wide anti-abuse policies", indexed by whether or not the service has a real name requirement. If we were making more money I'd fund one.)

The argument advanced by proponents of a "real" name policy, if I'm following correctly, is that people displaying their "real" name will think carefully about their behavior, for fear of accumulating negative reputation. What this argument fails to take into account is that "real" names are not unique identifiers -- I'm not the only Denise Paolucci in the world (and I feel sorry for the other ones out there, because their Google results are suffering from the same harassment as mine are and I feel obliquely guilty over that). When mark started working in the LJ office, at a time when there were only six employees in-office, not a single one of his three names (first, middle, family) was unique enough to be called by in casual office conversation. I, personally, don't feel much real emotional attachment to the reputation juice of "Denise Paolucci", because that's not me. When a bunch of disgruntled griefers took exception to me doing my job and decided to Googlebomb my name and try to destroy my professional reputation, I was annoyed, but I wasn't enraged. When people start fucking with the online reputation of "rahaeli", that's when I get furious.

And, of course, none of this is getting into the disproportionate chilling effect a "real name" policy has on vulnerable populations, nor the times when anonymity can literally be a condition of life or death, nor the fact that anonymity alone is not synonymous with abuse, nor the fact that "real names" are more complicated than most programmers think, nor the fact that enforcement of a "real name" policy disproportionately causes grief for anyone who isn't an upper-class, White, Westerner whose name can be rendered in ISO-8859-1 encoding. All of these considerations are important to keep in mind, and all of them are excellent reasons not to adopt a "real names" policy for your system.

But the first and foremost reason to avoid a "real name" policy is, and continues to be, that it is worthless for the purposes people try to use it for. The amount of abuse on your service has nothing to do with whether or not people are using their real names. It has to do with the community norms, the standard that people hold each other to, the tools you give your users to manage reputation and abuses, and the clearly-communicated expectations of the service. There's a reason we have our Diversity Statement and Guiding Principles linked on the bottom of every site page: it tells you the standard that we hold ourselves to, and implicitly challenges you all to live up to the same standards in your dealings with each other. And you know what? It's working.

I am disappointed in Google for taking such a simplistic, reductionist approach to the problem of online abuse, harassment, and reputation. They can do better.

Comments

[lassarina]

My mum threw the most epic of fits when I wanted to meet benjamindunbar in real life. Sent my dad off with me and everything. Now he comes to my house for Thanksgiving and Christmas and is treated as part of the family. XD My experiences have pretty much been awesome. But there's always that part of my brain.

[shandrew]

It's harsh and unfortunate, but true. I'm talking about people who just joined Facebook last year, just got wireless a couple years ago, people who have their kids setup/fix a computer for them, people who look at you strange when you ask "what web browser are you using". This is an average internet user today.

They're not going to change--they're going to simply avoid communities that they're not comfortable with.

Is there a way around this? Maybe, but it would be very complicated. One of the hardest problems in interface design is how to create something complicated that works well for both new and experienced users. I can imagine some design which when newbie users join, they are only shown friends and family, and the rest of the community is only slowly exposed. I do wish that Google+ tried to take more risks with regards to its interface (remember what webmail programs were like before gmail? maps interfaces before google maps?), but it seems like their choices were driven by growing as fast as possible, thus they used an interface that the most people were familiar with--facebook-style.

[franzeska]

My stepdad got me my own e-mail address so I'd stop using his on usenet ~1994. He worked at UC Berkeley. I guess it never occurred to him that first initial-last name is not a required format for all e-mail addresses everywhere forever. And my first name is sufficiently uncommon that I think there are two of us in the US and maybe 5-6 of us online at all even now (and for most of the time I've been online, it was just me or just me and the other person in the US). So that was that in terms of pseudonymity. After I'd been online some years, my mother started getting worried about me putting my birthdate up all over and using my real name. Horse. Barn door. *cough*

So while I was born in 1981, I know exactly what you mean. Real names were totally common online in the 80s, and that was only starting to change around the Eternal September. Half of my usenet friends went by their highly-identifiable real names; the other half I don't even know given names for. That "real names" policy crap severely impacts my ability to, you know, network with a social group that has always had a lot of both/all styles of name.

And it gets worse: I have a combination of names that is, I'm pretty sure, genuinely unique among all people living or dead. You can google me and find stuff from college and high school (at least you used to be able to) and other blatantly RL contexts. I am open about what my name is and have been so for 15+ years... And I still get accused of being a sockpuppet because my name's spelled funny. People think I'm a sock or a pseudonym for a Frances or a Francesca. Sheesh.

There's no point in even going near G- if this is what already happens in parts of fandom where people should know better.

[franzeska]

The abuse reports at AO3 and (anecdotally) every other fandom site I've ever seen have supported your interpretation: Some people have a billion socks and are clever about their stalking. Other people openly carry their grudges and feuds from site to site to site regardless of the social consequences. If they'll do it with the same screen name for years, they'd do it with real names. If they're making all those plausibly-named socks, they'll do it no matter what the naming policies are.

In my experience, the amount of trouble admins have to deal with is mostly related to how much the real TOS match the perceived social norms among site users. If there's something people think would obviously be allowed or ought to be allowed, they'll do it. If it isn't actually allowed, other people will grudge-report them for it. That goes for ffn or ao3 or G- or Prohibition or anything else.

[beatrice_otter]

There is, of course, a Biblical mandate for a more inclusive 'real name' policy. "Peter" was not Saint Peter's "real name." Peter's real name was Simon bar Jonah. "Peter" (Petros in Latin, Κηφᾶς (Cephas) in Greek) is a nickname given to him by Jesus, and it means 'rock'. Yet that nickname--not his real name!--is what he's been primarily known as for the last 2,000 years. If it's good enough for Jesus, it should be good enough for Google, I say. ;P

[jeshyr]

Ohhhh, this actually makes a lot of sense!

Because I know the stuff people have said above about actual names not being super useful to advertising in many cases, and also I know Google people are not totally stupid, so that didn't totally make sense. That they're selling the ... well, I guess the idea of names ... that actually makes more sense to me. It would be like the advertising equivalent of security theatre!

[ironed_orchid]

I've come back a few days later because I really love your comment, especially the bit about scary Internet People.

[crschmidt.livejournal.com]

I love this:

1. People’s names are assigned at birth.
2. OK, maybe not at birth, but at least pretty close to birth.
3. Alright, alright, within a year or so of birth.
4. Five years?
5. You’re kidding me, right?

Anyway, great post with solid insights. Thanks!

[krait]

THIS. I always tell people, when they exclaim that I am not on Facebook, that I grew up in the "Never Ever Give Your Personal Info Online" generation. :D

I have even asked friends of my RL-journal not to use my real name in posts about our group activities, to use my LJ name instead. (Note that usage -- I have separate journals for RL and fandom! It makes me feel very old-school, sometimes. :D I'm not going to give it up, though -- there are a host of reasons, from the minor to the quite major, for me to keep those aspects of myself separate, and I refuse to use any service which will not grant me the right to do so.)

[aquaeri]

I agree with everything you say.

It's interesting to hear that you don't identify with denise. You might need to think about that, because I'm sure I'm not the only DW user who is carrying around a notion of who denise is, and as far as I'm concerned it's all good stuff, about running an ethical business, being honest with customers/users, and writing awesome position statements like this one :-).

[lobelia321]

This was linked via cathexys so at first I didn't know who had written it. Within one sentence, I was thinking 'hang on', and by sentence number 2 I did a double-take and realised, of course, this sensible and irreverent voice could only by you! *smooches you a thousand times* You are my standard for all things ethical! This post is solid gold. (And the naming link is hilarious. And a bit sad, too.)

[azurelunatic]

My cousin (he of the interesting chocolate molding project).

[azurelunatic]

*nods* Right. All the full names that one is entitled to doesn't necessarily equal preferred form of address, and furthermore preferred form of address can vary based on audience. I'd be formally addressed as the Reverend Lunatic, but close friends (and all of #dreamwidth IRC) should call me Azz. Neither of these names are especially an intuitive contraction of "Azure Lunatic", and while I'm the same name up and down most parts of the internet, I have to adjust my name as it is displayed to various portions simply so I don't get addressed in the wrong way (as no one but Betty may call me AL, but chat forums do have a tendency to shorten names). So one of the things that G+ could have done right would be to allow one to have a different immediately-displayed name to each circle so they could call me correctly, whether or not they saw my full name as displayed on my profile.

[azurelunatic]

'80. I actually became more vigilant about it after a cascade of internet problems of one of the typical sorts -- close friend pissed off an easily annoyed crowd with a lot of time on their hands and few scruples, who decided to entertain themselves by causing as much physical annoyance for the friend and any of their immediate and tertiary crowd that they could dig up info on. But then, my dad was in the sciences and sending the occasional care package to Russia, so my family understood the concept of internet friendships well before the average household did. Though my father did check up on my internet activities and evaluated the mailing list I was on as mostly harmless, so it wasn't like I was entirely unsupervised.

[azurelunatic]

I am now fine with known-and-trusted-forever internet people showing up, but I have had some fairly epically bad experiences with loose-crowd-of-people-with-shared-interests-congregating-via-the-internet meetups in person, where one meets people face-to-face without having known what they're like online and doing the pre-sorting there, and then when one clicks especially well with a person and wants to continue face-to-face meetups ...

... the guy who held my brother, my roommates, and me at AK-47-point and ordered us out of his place in a homophobic panic, he holds a special place in my OH GOD NEVER AGAIN files.

So I prefer to have extensive pre-screening in text, where the biases that are hidden in face-to-face pleasantries come out to play.

[azurelunatic]

I think what Jo Average really wants out of a "real" name, on a site that's intended to be for communicating with each other, is to have the name that's in front of them connected to that person's presence be a name that the person on the other end of the online presence doesn't mind being addressed as/referred to by when casually communicating to others, whether it be online, offline, phone, TTY relay, or my favorite, everybody-in-the-same-room-all-on-laptops with occasional shouting and giggling.

Sometimes professional identity is important. Sometimes government ID identity is important. But the real important thing for social is a common name to refer to and address a person by.

You're Rah. (Or Syne. Or, sometimes, when I'm talking in contexts where it's appropriate, D.) I'm Azz (or Rev. Lunatic). jd is JD. semanticist is John, but I have to qualify that, since there are so many; I don't mean that John whose anime night we are never going back to, nor thatjohn, who is not that *other* John either, but a different one, and g-d help us all if we get into the Johns who don't go by John in their daily life but are nonetheless John on their state ID.

I think username and displayed name is a good way of balancing uniqueness and addressability/referencability, though it helps when the displayed name doesn't also wind up being the place to stash injokes and such.

Let's not get any of us started on avatar vs. icon. ;)

[lassarina]

....good Lord. I. Yes. That preference makes perfect sense.

(Many of my online friends now come to my house for holidays, where my mother feeds them and fusses over them just like she did my best friend at age ten who lived down the street. I just inevitably have that one moment of oh-dear-God panic the first time meeting someone.)

[azurelunatic]

(dropping back into the party very late)

And even eBay now encourages people to adopt a unique pseudonym to discourage identity theft now.