Social media has always had a real-names problem.
Social media companies want their users to use their real names because
it makes it easier to advertise to them. Users want to be able to show
different facets of their identities to different people, because only a
sociopath interacts with their boss, their kids, and their spouse in
the same way.
Mark Zuckerberg (whose commitment to his own privacy is unchecked in its brutality) has frequently dressed up his business-need for Facebook users to have a single identity in halfassed moral philosophy, calling people who show different parts of themselves to different people “two-faced.”
But kids hate this stuff. Amy Lancaster from the Journalism and Digital Communications school at the University of Central Lancashire studies
the way that young people resent “the way Facebook ties them into a
fixed self…[linking] different areas of a person’s life, carrying over
from school to university to work.”
