Melissa Gira's dashboard

I agree that doing advocacy/activism on platforms that have no interest in protecting activists' privacy is risky behavior, but people are doing it anyway. (The issue of bloggers who want brand extension under a psuedonym being "banned" from Facebook pales in comparison, for me.) I can tell sex workers in Cambodia and Thailand that YouTube isn't the best place to put videos documenting protests, for lots of reasons, but that's where a huge audience is all the same. Open source activist tools are crucial, but not enough people know what's out there or how to use them well. "Accidental" activism is happening on MySpace and on Wordpress blogs -- in fact, folks from Wordpress have been responsive to questions around the deletion of activists' blogs, and wanted to have a conversation around why anonymity is important. For the sake of this forum, I'd just like to highlight that Facebook needs to hear that users want to know why they want our real and/or legal names.

Re: anonymity and Facebook, this is not just an issue of sexuality and privacy. There are significant reasons that human rights activists and political dissidents would wish to use Facebook (and already use other online services) for organizing, and need to do so under a name other than the one on whatever government issued documents they have, if any.

I would like to know what the motives were at Facebook for restricting users to "real-sounding" names, as clearly, a legal name is not the criteria. There is value in having an online community in which there aren't scores of billandsuzie69's. Which isn't to thrash swingers, or closeted fetishists, or any other subcategory of us sex people -- who, more and more, want to take a place in the "professional" side of web community, but must do so with a bit of anonymity. Sometimes that anonymity has nothing to do with hiding one's face; it's not as if, for example, Facebook will suddenly become awash in a sea of genital photos. It's a matter of search engine (in)visibility between a birth name and a nom de guerre, and, now, even more so, a matter of consistent brand recognition under a chosen name.