Powerful people imprisoned by the cluelessness of their own isolation, locked up with their own motivated reasoning: "It's impossible to get a CEO to understand something when his quarterly earnings call depends on him not understanding it."
Take Mark Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg insists that anyone who wanted to use a pseudonym online is "two-faced," engaged in dishonest social behavior. The Zuckerberg Doctrine claims that forcing people to use their own names is a way to ensure civility. This is an idea so radioactively wrong, it can be spotted from orbit.
From the very beginning, social scientists (both inside and outside Facebook) told Zuckerberg that he was wrong. People have lots of reasons to hide their identities online, both good and bad, but a Real Names Policy affects different people differently:
For marginalized and at-risk people, there are plenty of reasons to want to have more than one online identity – say, because you are a #MeToo whistleblower hoping that Harvey Weinstein won't sic his ex-Mossad mercenaries on you:
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/harvey-weinsteins-army-of-spies
Or maybe you're a Rohingya Muslim hoping to avoid the genocidal attentions of the troll army that used Facebook to organize – under their real, legal names – to rape and murder you and everyone you love:
But even if no one is looking to destroy your life or kill you and your family, there are plenty of good reasons to present different facets of your identity to different people. No one talks to their lover, their boss and their toddler in exactly the same way, or reveals the same facts about their lives to those people. Maintaining different facets to your identity is normal and healthy – and the opposite, presenting the same face to everyone in your life, is a wildly terrible way to live...
Thanks to @pluralistic - excellent work as always, Mr. Doctorow.