"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

[rydra_wong]

Non-rhetorical question: do you think people are specifically drawn to services that have "real names" policies?

I've seen a number of people who are leaving Google+ because of it, but no-one who's joining because of it -- but I'm aware that obviously my social circles skew in particular directions. If you've got examples of people who've been specifically attracted to Google+ by the "real names" policy, please link.

If it's a big draw for some people, I'd be interested to know why; the first reason to occur to me was that people feel that it makes them safer from abuse or harassment, but as denise points out, that's be a misconception.

Or there's the comfort factor of "it seems just like Facebook" which shandrew suggests above. But that's a weird self-reinforcing thing, which is parasitic on Facebook already existing and being the only potential pool from which to draw Google+ users.

Google+ has made a business decision to have a real names policy because it wants to be as big as Facebook, rather than as big as Dreamwidth.

I would point out that the difference in size between Facebook and Dreamwidth is rather more likely to be due to the fact that Facebook's a long-established empire whereas Dreamwidth's only existed for two years, among other reasons.

But I assume that's blatantly obvious and you're just ignoring it for the sake of the snark, right? *g*

[space_dinosaur_blue]

Sorry for breaking in...

A phrase that has been passed around the last week is "security placebo". In the context that a "real names, real people" policy is just that - a security placebo.

Some of the most vicious arguments on G+ came from users who unthinkingly, uncritcally assumed that the community would be instantly ruined if "Internet People" were allowed on it. Kind of a weird way to put it - what counted as Internet People since the users afraid of them were also using the Internet?

As near as one can tell "Internet People" means those who don't use the Internet as a scrapbook for a very recongizable, "ordinary" real life. If you use a strange sounding name or one that's just plain too "whimsical", if you have a strange picture instead of a photo of your ugly mug... you're not "real users". You're fantastical Internet People who evidently don't really exist. Strange phantoms of the world wide web.

I get the impression that this is a meme which really is entrenched in much of popular culture. Facebook has, even if inadvertently, helped reinforce the meme by displaying a version of the Internet that looks more recognizable to the layperson, than the formerly impenetrable geek-and-young-people's realm of Computer Stuff.

So, even though "real names" and real-sounding names do nothing, alone, to keep any but the weakest-willed, timid jerks and trolls in line, the notion that "we're enforcing the rules of real life! Accountability! Security! People standing behind their Good Christian Name as in the days when Men were Men and Oxen were Oxen!" plays great in Poughkeepsie, as they say. It's a security placebo.

[rydra_wong]

Sorry for breaking in...

You're very welcome to break in (also, hi and welcome to Dreamwidth!). I like the "security placebo" idea.

Kind of a weird way to put it - what counted as Internet People since the users afraid of them were also using the Internet?

So essentially, the idea is "enforce real-sounding names, so the users don't realize that they're actually on the scary, scary Internet"? *g*

Which is both amusing and, now I think about it, potentially a little sinister. Because if you know you're on the scary scary Internet, you guard your private information. You might avoid giving out your real name or your location or what job you do or who your RL friends are -- or all the other demographic data which it'd be nice to collate and sell to advertisers.

[space_dinosaur_blue]

Their attitude seems to be the origin of the now infamous "fancy restaurant" analogy. That G+ wants everyone to "dress appropriately" as if they're out to dinner among high society. Which does make its own kind of sense - bowing the the expectations of "high society" in terms of dress, mannerisms, and what of one's self one presents.

Except just who is "high society"? There's the rub I suppose.

Or as someone on G+ said "So basically they're saying they don't want an honest man in a ratty jacket in the establishment, but they're fine with a sociopath who mugs a well dressed man on the way in and steals his jacket. Gotcha."

[chaos_by_design]

I just want to say I love your comment. Security placebo indeed. And that is an interesting point about FB making the internet seem more accessible to a "normal" person, ie. a person who socializes mainly in "real" life and not primarily on the internet.

It seems like a similar culture clash to the advent of AOL.

It is interesting how you can get as attached to a pseudonym as you can to your "real" name. I've been "chaos_by_design" since 2001, and recently I deleted my LJ because I felt like I didn't have a healthy relationship with it anymore. Part of the reason I undeleted it was because I was attached to my username and didn't want to see someone else eventually snatching it up.

[ironed_orchid]

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

[iainjcoleman.livejournal.com]

A real names policy means you can quickly create big networks of casual users, and casual users can more readily join the network and get involved.

On Facebook, I'm connected to aunts, cousins and old schoolfriends, people who I rarely connect with in other ways and who I could never find on DW or LJ even if they were on it - and most of them wouldn't be, because they're not all hugely computer-savvy, and would struggle to get much use out of a social network where you couldn't find people simply by searching on their real names.

By contrast, I have known people in real life for ages without finding out their pseuds on LJ or DW - and known some pseuds for ages before finding out whether or not I knew them in real life. That's a barrier to growing a network.

If you want to build a big network, quickly, make it easy for people to find other people on the network who they already know. Real names facilitate this - pseuds don't.

[rydra_wong]

Oh, interesting. So their basic model is "social networking as a device for maintaining contact with people you already know off-line" as opposed to "social networking as a device for meeting and interacting with new people/blogging platform/forum for discussion"?

I'd be prepared to believe that's what they're aiming for; I'm just pondering the fact that it involves a very specific model of what a social network does.

[matgb]

Specifically, Facebook has a box for "I don't know this person" and when it started it insisted on you filling in a relationship for every friend, and if you ticked "don't know them" it asked why you were adding them (or agreeing to them adding you).

It's how I used LJ for ages, and I still know people on there who have never added anyone they haven't met in person.

Thing is, G+ is palpably not being designed with that model in mind, the whole point of Circles, including a 'following' circle by default, is that you add people you find interesting including people you've not met, etc.

I do think they're in the "it'll put "real" people off" mindset, but I think they're mostly wrong there, it'll put people off adding some people, but you can encourage a preference without enforcing it.

[space_dinosaur_blue]

One question I haven't really seen posed or addressed is "is enforcing real names necessary to get real names?"

It's clear that most people who would fall into the median Facebook user category don't even think of signing up for something that isn't their in-my-wallet name. If they can be depended on to essentially use their "real name" anyway, why bother enforcing an absolute "real names" policy but rather focus purely on spambot and impersonation accounts? Why deal with the complaints of the large minority who may show up with something that isn't a "real person name".

It seems it'd be much, much easier to draft a simple set of guidelines for even the most untrained security review persons that began and ended with "Challenge this account if it is named Lady Gaga, Coca-Cola, or Jenifer2456 and posts nothing but off-site ad links" Instead, the staff seems to be nuking accounts based on wildly varying personal opinions.

[matgb]

If they can be depended on to essentially use their "real name" anyway, why bother enforcing an absolute "real names" policy

Exactly. I'd rather G+ was predominantly "real names" by which I mean the names most people are actually referred to. I've worked with SE asian people who use an anglicised name in all Enlgish language contexts, always, that is, to them, their 'real' name in English, G+ says that's not allowed, etc.

I've already been followed by at least one spammmer on G+, possibly several. I've encountered rank idiots who wouldn't know the etiquette of a conversation if you hit them with it.

There's no need to force everyone to use their real names, most people will anyway, those that don't have a reason, and frankly I don't care what that reason is, the service is of no use to me if half my friends aren't on it.

[iainjcoleman.livejournal.com]

As they say, on Facebook you follow people you used to know, on Twitter you follow people you want to know.