Identity

Human beings have messy, complex, evolving, multiple identities, and privacy rules can nurture the social processes by which we figure out who we are and what we believe. These processes include both the intellectual freedom that intellectual privacy protects as well as the kinds of identity play that other privacy rules enable. Three additional examples illustrate the ways in which privacy promotes identity formation. Privacy protects us from identity “forcing”: when technologies force us into single identities, such as through Facebook’s oppressive “real name” policy. Privacy protects us from “filtering”: the use of human information to “personalize” our news feeds and media consumption in ways that screen out ideas and information that the algorithm predicts we won’t like or don’t need. And privacy protects us from “exposure”: the risk of disclosure of information about us that chills us into social, intellectual, and political conformity.

Fight for Your Platform to Party: Brooklyn Drag and the Battle for a Queerer Facebook

The final field study describes Brooklyn’s contemporary drag community and their use of social media. Digital technologies provide important tools for individual self-promotion, as well as establishing a collective archive of queer identity. In particular, I consider tensions between drag queens and Facebook’s real name policy, and the ways that the platform inscribes mainstream understandings of identity.

Why Taiwanese people do not comply with Facebook's real name policy

I explored the naming practices adopted by Taiwanese users of Facebook in relation to the website's real name policy, with the aim of identifying the underlying reasons for choosing not to comply with this policy. For this investigation, I surveyed 993 user accounts and conducted 40 interviews, with the results revealing that there are 4 main types of naming methods that are most commonly encountered in a Taiwanese cultural context: official name in Chinese, Romanized official name, English name with Romanized surname, and nickname. I uncovered 5 underlying reasons for choosing usernames: expecting to connect with friends and acquaintances, using a previous name, attempting to hide from individuals, intending not to use a real name online, and following globalization trends. The results indicated that 42.70% of users surveyed did not rigorously adhere to the real name policy, and that naming practices differed between university students and working professionals. My findings have implications for practitioners seeking to effectively develop and manage their online social network.

Social Media Affordances and the Capital of Queer Self-Expression

This chapter presents an overview of the September 2014 controversy surrounding Facebook's enforcement of their “real name policy,” the disproportionate targeting of drag performers for profile suspension, and the queer community's brief exodus to the network Ello. By drawing on research about identity in the online age, queer and subcultural theory, and the concept of affordances in social media, the author seeks to illuminate some of the causes of this incident, and the motivations of the actors involved. The online profile is framed as a locus for the construction of alternative identities—particularly those which challenge gender norms—as well as tension when that process is restricted. The author attempts to locate this concept of profiles, and the networked communities built from them, within a larger web of capital relations, exploring how the online and offline intersect therein.

Measuring the Use of Real-Name Policy in Micro-Blogging of China

Real-name policy has been adopted in some specific fields of China for several years. As the leading micro-blogging service of China, Weibo has introduced the real name policy in 2012. However, the question is that how the real-name policy is used is still unknown. In this paper, with a dataset of 158,979 accounts crawled from Weibo, we conduct a deep measurement and analysis on the use of real-name policy. We find that although the rule has been promoted for several years, the proportion of verified users is still small. Our work also shows that famous people tend to use their real names to gain more public attentions. And a verified user is more likely to be followed by others.

Making the Case for Anonymity in E-Participation - An Evaluation of Real Name Policy in Gütersloh’s Second Participatory Budget

The paper relates the debate about real name policy on social networking platforms and online forums to online moderated consultation processes in the area of e-participation. It analyses the case of the second participatory budget of the German city of Gütersloh. Three major rationales for real name policy in e-participatory projects are identified: the possibility to restrict access, prevention of offensive communication, and the strengthening of a transparent democracy. The five major objections identified are: distraction from issue-related dialogue, violation of privacy rights, administrative problems causing high expenditure of time and costs, negative media and public attention, and usability problems that may result in a low rate of participation. The evidence found indicates that the negative consequences of real name policy outweigh the positive ones. Important directions of further research are pointed out. The paper is an extended version of a paper presented at the Conference for E-Democracy and Open Government in 2012.