From the Fantasy to the Reality: Social Media and Real Name Policies

Abstract

This paper surveys the controversial landscape of “real name” policies on social media. While alleged to be desirable to promote social and polite behaviour online as well as accountability, such policies may have less obvious ulterior motivations, and may also have considerable undesirable consequences and threaten political freedom as well as freedom of speech. After a brief history of the tradition of pseudonymity on socuial networks, and an overview of the failure of law to guarantee a right to pseudonymity or alternate remedy,the paper suggests the way forward may lie with creating a truely competitive market in social media via a technical research programme that aims to replace the proprietary “walled garden” approach to social networks with a decentralised, dynamic and non-proprietary approach.

Keywords: social media, real names, pseudonymity, anonymity, data protection, privacy, Facebook, Google Plus