User:Anwar Sadat's Horny Ghost/Real Name Culture

Real Name Culture is the delusional belief that users of the internet, a communication medium devoid of identifying information, can be forced to provide their legal name in exchange for the use of buggy and unwieldy social networks. In practice, it works just about as well as it sounds.

Tit For Tat

Real Name Culture is the Orwellian term for your giving Facebook dox in exchange for seeing image macros your grandmother posts. You make this tiny sacrifice so that Facebook can make it's quarterly earnings target by selling your data to whoever the fuck has the coin. You are required to self dox, no matter how many people want to rape and murder your unpopular ass. Muslim troll and author Ahmed Salman Rushdie was threatened with having his account closed for not using his given first name, despite having sold several million books as “Salman Rushdie”. When Rushdie did what he did best and created a shitstorm, The Facebook God granted him a one time waiver to prevent pissing off the far few not already craving his demise. The networks requiring real names may occasionally hop on the anti-bullying bandwagon and tout their “efforts” to “help” the “problem”, but former members of any of these regimes make it abundantly clear the only reason for their insistence of birth names is the wholesale selling of all of your precious data to sketchy data aggregators.

Application

Real Name Culture is also a powerful tool in the troll's toolbox. Should a target refuse to use a real name on a real name site, and proof is found, reporting repeatedly may very well result in a review of the account. This puts the victim in a corner, forcing them choose between doxing themselves and losing all of their hard earned Farmville cattle. If the affected account is used to log into other sites, the lulz can magnify exponentially. Best of all, the loss is essentially irreversible.

This can also be used on wikis where a Real Name is required to post, which means that the same trolling can be done, and even better, it's pretty much impossible for someone who used their Real Name on a wiki to destroy the evidence by means of delete fucking everything.