<story><title>Facebook Wants You To Snitch On Friends Not Using Their Real Name</title><url>http://paulbernal.wordpress.com/2012/09/21/facebook-snitchgate/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>psbp</author><text>Now imagine a whole generation socializing under these artificial restrictions. Can you imagine how stifling being raised under an umbrella of constant surveillance by your peer group, family, future employers and advertisers would be to your personality and relationships? We&apos;re developing a society of sociopatic egotists.</text></item><item><author>prodigal_erik</author><text>What Facebook and Google+ gain in politesse, they lose in depth and honesty. I can&apos;t assume I&apos;ll be held &quot;accountable&quot; in a just way by every prospective employer, apartment manager, or lover I&apos;ll ever meet, so these venues get empty pleasantries from me, certainly nothing controversial in any way.</text></item><item><author>Smudge</author><text>Enforcing real names has pros and cons. For Facebook as a business, the pros certainly outweigh the value lost when accounts can&apos;t be mapped directly to real people. Names are a key part of that mapping.&lt;p&gt;In general, I prefer an option for pseudonymity, because it is much more inclusive (allowing certain people at the fringes to feel more comfortable joining in -- victims of abuse, political dissidents, etc), and is much less messy than total anonymity (which wouldn&apos;t really work for something like Facebook, not that there isn&apos;t a place for it elsewhere on the web). That said, pseudonymity can still get messy, so I see why Facebook might want to keep it in check.&lt;p&gt;One can also make the argument that the level of discourse is much higher on services where people are more personally accountable for what they say, and where confusing or offensive usernames don&apos;t get in the way of conversations. But I would say that the actual level of discourse sometimes found on Facebook throws that argument into question.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jodrellblank</author><text>We are basically under constant surveillance by our peer group and family, just not in an Orwellian sense.&lt;p&gt;It&apos;s incredibly common for people to grow up afraid to say many things, having massive restrictions on some parts of their personalities due to those kinds of pressures.&lt;p&gt;We see it most obviously with the single big things such as &quot;I can&apos;t tell my religious family I&apos;m an atheist&quot; or &quot;I got ostracised for dating someone from another culture&quot; or whatever, but it&apos;s almost certainly going on for a huge range of smaller personality facets - or ones which were blanked out before they developed.&lt;p&gt;Who would you be if you&apos;d never had any restrictions on what you could say other than moral ones? If any interest you had,  you would have been supported in following up, any comment you made would have been taken seriously and never laughed at, any  attempt to better yourself was encouraged not mocked.&lt;p&gt;Maybe more and more surveillance such as you imagine will actually make it &lt;i&gt;more&lt;/i&gt; obvious that others opinions are their largely their own problem and don&apos;t affect you all that much, and you should develop more confidence sooner.</text></comment>
<story><title>Facebook Wants You To Snitch On Friends Not Using Their Real Name</title><url>http://paulbernal.wordpress.com/2012/09/21/facebook-snitchgate/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>psbp</author><text>Now imagine a whole generation socializing under these artificial restrictions. Can you imagine how stifling being raised under an umbrella of constant surveillance by your peer group, family, future employers and advertisers would be to your personality and relationships? We&apos;re developing a society of sociopatic egotists.</text></item><item><author>prodigal_erik</author><text>What Facebook and Google+ gain in politesse, they lose in depth and honesty. I can&apos;t assume I&apos;ll be held &quot;accountable&quot; in a just way by every prospective employer, apartment manager, or lover I&apos;ll ever meet, so these venues get empty pleasantries from me, certainly nothing controversial in any way.</text></item><item><author>Smudge</author><text>Enforcing real names has pros and cons. For Facebook as a business, the pros certainly outweigh the value lost when accounts can&apos;t be mapped directly to real people. Names are a key part of that mapping.&lt;p&gt;In general, I prefer an option for pseudonymity, because it is much more inclusive (allowing certain people at the fringes to feel more comfortable joining in -- victims of abuse, political dissidents, etc), and is much less messy than total anonymity (which wouldn&apos;t really work for something like Facebook, not that there isn&apos;t a place for it elsewhere on the web). That said, pseudonymity can still get messy, so I see why Facebook might want to keep it in check.&lt;p&gt;One can also make the argument that the level of discourse is much higher on services where people are more personally accountable for what they say, and where confusing or offensive usernames don&apos;t get in the way of conversations. But I would say that the actual level of discourse sometimes found on Facebook throws that argument into question.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>JoachimSchipper</author><text>That assumes that people don&apos;t ignore the constant surveillance and largely do whatever they were going to do anyway. Most non-geeks seem to do just that.&lt;p&gt;(Whether that is a good idea is another matter. Also, I still don&apos;t like Facebook.)</text></comment>