Multiple Identities are Good Actually

Introduction

Every once in a while the discussion if people should use real names online is brought up again. People in favor of this often claim that if a person would use their real name they will act more accountable, that it will improve engagement, or that you know who you are talking to1. The first can be disproven by a curious glance at the cesspool that is Facebook (the most famous place with a real name policy) and the second is of questionable utility anyway.2 The third one is a bit (but only a bit) more interesting but still fails – since just as the first two arguments – assumes that people only have a single identity which as pointed out by Soatok Dhole in the following quote isn’t true.

[…]
Identities have a many-to-many relationship with Humans.
[…]
– Soatok Dhole - Going Bark: a Furrys Guide to End to End Encryption

Assuming people only have a single identity is problematic for a wide variety of reasons; ranging from the relative simple like issues related to work/live balance to the live threatening (think LGBTQ+ youth with conservative parents).

This leaves us with the following questions:

  • What is an identity anyway?
  • How can I have multiple of those?
  • Why is that useful?

Answering the questions

Before we continue lets answers the above questions

What is an identity

At it simplest an identity is a set of information, where that information can be used to distingue that identity from others tough in many cases one might need to combine pieces of information to get to a single identity. This information can be anything from names, to addresses (email, ip or physical) and anything in between. For example my identity as Botch Frivarg constitutes among other things out of this website, my twitter handle, the nick name I use on my flickr page, etc. From this it is pretty clear that an identity is not the same thing as a person.

How can you have multiple identities

As seen above a single identity is not the same thing as a single person, the reverse is also true, a good example of this is “Erin Hunter” the pseudonym of the writers writing the Warriors series of books3, as can be seen from this example multiple people can share a single identity! Of course these writers also have their own identities and might even write books under their own names as well!

We can even go so far as that in many cases information is shared between identities. For example my age (a bit of information that can be used for identification purpose) is shared by my private, work, and furry identities; another example is my ‘real’ name which is only shared with my work and private identity but not my furry one! The following Venn diagram might make this even clearer (the diagram is not complete)

Venn diagram of Botch Frivarg their identities and how they overlap
Venn Diagram of the identities of Botch Frivarg

Do note that how much identities overlap might change from person to person, e.g. the Venn diagram of someones work vs private identity might be almost a circle.

Why that is useful

Above we already saw one use of a multiple identity, a shared pseudonym for when multiple writers write a single series while still also being able to write other stuff under their own name. Another case of this is have one pseudonym to write adult material and write young adult fiction under your real name (or vice versa). A more serious example is for work/life balance where your work identity is to a certain extent independent from the private identity (e.g. having separate phone numbers for private and work). For LGBTQ+ youth this might even be a life and death situation – especially if they have conservative parents or family members they don’t want to be out to – being able to have a out and a none out identity! This is of course also useful for LGBTQ+ in general.

Here I can also take myself as an example, my furry identity allows me to explorer my gender identity in a safe way, publish my mostly furry oriented photo- and video-graphy, etc. without my work life (and to a lesser extend my personal life) being impacted. Also separating my work identity from my private one allows me to just turn off my work phone and ignore my work email while on a holiday while still staying in contact with friends and family using my personal phone and email.

Debunking real name policies

With the above information it becomes fairly easy to debunk the reasons people often cite for the real name policies, lets go over them one by one.

Accountability

The Accountability argument is all about the idea that people will start behaving if you link all their identities together, or to put it differently if they can effectively be “punished” for stuff they do in one identity in another identity (e.g. being fired from work for being an absolute asshole on the internet). This quickly becomes problematic if one considers minorities since in many places in the world you can be fired for being trans and/or gay. Also consider that even though people are officially forced to use their real name on Facebook there is still a huge amount of bigotry on that site all published under peoples real name!

In my experience the best way to keep people on their best behavior is proper moderation, consider that in many places there is a barrier to entry in that you need to sign up many trolls and bigots will give up when they need to keep making new accounts eventually pushing them out. This still leaves some cases where due to wanting legal action needs to know the person behind the identity, but even here there we have to consider that people often need to sign up to a service with e.g. email and other identifying information that could – with some bit of effort – can lead us back to an actual person. Given that this situation is actual pretty rare4 and people are rarely fully anonymous5 this last issue is not worth the risk of mandating real names.

Engagement

This one is a lot simpler, engagement metrics are driven by whatever algorithm the platform uses. So this is just a question of making sure the algorithms work with pseudonyms. The “people engage more when they think they are dealing with a real human”6 really leans heavily on that “think” in the middle and is a bit of a red herring since the algorithms are driving the engagement a lot more.

You know who you are talking to

No you don’t. For example if a person does most (if not all) of their creative work under a pseudonym then using their real name will make finding that work a lot harder. Sure there are ways around this (like being publicly out with the fact they are using a pseudonym), but these all link the pseudonym to the real name, something that person might not want to do!

I can use myself here as an example Botch Frivarg is known to be a photo- and video-grapher (especially in the furry fandom), you should be easily find my work when using that name. On the other hand if I would tell you my real name you would have a lot harder time finding my work (though not impossible, probably). Sure I could go “Hi I am Real Name, also known as Botch Frivarg”, but there are many reasons I (and many people like me) won’t be doing that.

In short sometimes you have a better idea who you are talking to when a person uses the pseudonym associated with whatever you are talking about.

The real reason platforms don’t like this

Now that I hope to have convinced you that not only you can have multiple identities but that can actually be useful, and that the major reasons people use in favor of “real name policies” are mostly bull you might be wondering why are platforms trying to enforce this? The short version of the answer is that it makes a lot easier to advertise, it makes it a lot easier to link a person to an identity. Example thing of a family home with parents and some kids, if people are using multiple identities each how would you know if this is one of the kids or one of the parents, or for that matter how many kids there are? There are ways to do this but it is a lot simpler to just say “you only get one identity” which is what “real name policies” boil down to.

Conclusion

Not only do “Real name policies” not what we want them to do they are also actually harmful to a lot of people (especially minorities). So it is only natural that we should oppose them, and we should especially oppose any and all laws that try to enforce this.7

  1. I’ve seen this last argument made by black magic designs on their forum ↩︎

  2. Algorithms driven by engagement metrics are the major reason Facebook, twitter, et. al. are such cesspools to begin with ↩︎

  3. Using the example of Erin Hunter here since in this case it is public knowledge ↩︎

  4. The situations are often fairly news worthy so seem to be more common than they actually are, also legal action is expensive. ↩︎

  5. As said people almost always need to sign up to services (be that forums or social media) using e.g. an email address, on top of that information like IP address, screen name (people often use the same or similar screen name for multiple accounts), etc are often available. ↩︎

  6. Also you can use a pseudonym that sounds like a real name easily enough if this is that important to you and that is just one of the ways to make sure that people “know” there is a real person ↩︎

  7. As far as I know there are currently no serious proposals anywhere but every so often a proposals does turn up and it only takes one popular politician to run with it for it to become a major problem ↩︎