Facebook's real name policy is still a huge problem

[Commentary] I got locked out of Facebook. I’d become one of the latest victims of Facebook’s real name policy. This wasn’t a huge shock for me. Though my entire career is conducted under the name Lux Alptraum, it is not the name that appears on my legal identification; given the unusual nature of the name, it’s not entirely surprising that it eventually set off someone’s red flag.

A number of Native American users have found that Facebook does not consider their names to be "real" enough, sometimes even after these users have submitted identification -- an ironic disenfranchisement that has not gone unnoticed. Underlying all of this is the fact that the search for a "better" real name policy is a bizarre and useless exercise, because "real names" are a clumsy metric for the issue that Facebook is trying to solve. If the desire is to prevent abuse, banning people who are largely using the service as intended seems counterintuitive. Monitoring behavior, rather than names, seems like a much more useful strategy. Furthermore, given all the tracking Facebook does in service of its advertising strategy, it doesn’t need users to present under their legal names to know who they "really" are. It should be able to devise a better system to determine who’s just setting up a fake account to troll, abuse, or misrepresent.