Let me be really clear about this. Any social media platform that is toying with the idea of requiring public "real names" use by users is playing with a ticking hydrogen bomb.
It should have been obvious enough how complicated this is given all the problems #Facebook caused when other sites started to require real names Facebook logins for access to comments and other features on those other sites.
I worked with some of these issues at Google, where originally Google Plus was using real names, though this was later wisely changed.
There is a long list of issues associated with forcing people to publicly use real names. Some people are just fine with using their real names on some sites, but on other sites dealing with other topics there's simply no good reason why they should be required to use their real names. An obvious example is someone being forced to use their real name to ask questions about a medical or other personal issue for which they could face discrimination in employment or elsewhere.
There is a controversial argument to be made, that I am frankly somewhat sympathetic toward (though I very much wish we had not come to this point), that in *some* situations where individuals are going to be posting to very large audiences, some way to identify those individuals in cases of extreme abuse may be necessary. I suspect that regulatory changes are headed in that direction.
BUT, and this is crucial, this should not mean that even those individuals would have to use their real names on posts, and their identities would need to be carefully protected, probably by a third party.
In practice, though it's easy to say all this in theory, I have doubts that it would work in the real world. Disadvantaged individuals and groups, whistleblowers, etc. are at special risk. Data leaks might reveal identity associations. It's all so very complicated. Perhaps -- even likely -- it's completely impossible to accomplish in a safe manner.
We're going to be seeing ever more calls for real names having some sort of role on the Internet. Some movement in this direction may be inevitable. But it is crucial that we don't fall hook, line, and sinker for social media firms trying to force individuals to use their real names publicly in the course of regular social media activities. That, is a trap. -L
@lauren I was there (but not working on Social) for the Great Real Names Considered Harmful debate at Google.
I never got a strong sense of why it was desired other than the two datapoints that (a) it was technically Facebook's (basically unenforced) policy and (b) Google already had experience with Orkut and it seemed like some senior leadership believed Orkut's failure to gain traction was due to how hard it was to find people you knew IRL in the Orkut network because people didn't publish their names.
Do you have any insight on what happened there? The third theory I've heard is "because advertising;" that never seemed sufficient to me, but maybe it was?
@lauren The first yellow flag on the whole thing for me was when the SVP in charge of the project posted a big rah-rah internal message about G+, a popular Googler responded to that internal post with "FIRST!", and that Googler was then asked side-channel to *take that reply down.*
In hindsight, the leadership who thought that ask was appropriate or sensible was *exactly* the leadership that would blindly blunder into "Let's just fuse YouTube comments to G+ comments, what's the worst that could happen, all comments are fungible and there's no such thing as a 'community culture'."
@mtomczak The "community culture" aspect was crucial. Another way to put it relates to context. My view was that the contexts of YT comments and G+ threads were usually entirely different. If you pushed G+ threads into YT comments -- as the integration did -- it could create some very creepy situations, and that's not just theoretical.
Let's say someone in a G+ thread during that period said something like, "Did you see the idiot who made this YT video?" and gave the URL. So that G+ thread would get pushed into the YT comments for that video, where the YT video creator and his fans there would go absolutely ballistic. "Who the hell are you? Why are you injecting yourself into this discussion? You haven't even read the other comments on this video have you?" And so on. It could get quite ugly.
@mtomczak It was certainly an issue of concern. Within literally minutes of my initially logging into G corp, I was emailed a packet of materials relating to that ongoing debate. I think you're right that Facebook had a lot to do with it, and that real names were something of a "fad" at that point, which hadn't really been vetted by anyone, anywhere regarding the many complex issues and downsides. I think this also played a role in the rather disastrous G+/YT threads/comments integration, which I fought against and which was eventually rescinded but not before a lot of reputation damage to G had already occured.
I suspect that much of what was learned back then has already been forgotten (or is being ignored) as we see "real names" come back into focus again with most of the risks and problems still unsolved.