This article originally appeared on Geek Feminism.
We have enough nymwars links for them to be their own linkspam, and likely our commenters have more to add too.
- Skud’s series of posts on her own Google+ suspension: I’ve been suspended from Google+, More comments on Google+ and names, Preliminary results of my survey of suspended Google+ accounts, Google is gagging user advocates, An update on my Google Plus suspension
- The Google+ Nymwars: Where Identity and Capitalism Collide:
What Google seems to want from Google+ users is their full legal names, although it will not come out and admit this. Not just that, but only full legal names which conform with Western European/North American naming standards… What this is really about, of course, is capitalism, which some people advocating for legal names will admit, in a sort of roundabout, weird argument. They say
it’s not about safety, of course, the service wants real names because then it can sell the data,
like this somehow ends the argument and the discussion can stop now. - Denise Paolucci, “Real Name” policies: They just don’t work.:
Many of the people who caused the worst problems on LiveJournal over the years had registered with some variant on their
real
name, or had theirreal
name in their profile somewhere, or were widely known under theirreal
name. - GrrlScientist, Google+ and pseudonymity: An open letter to Google:
Taken together, this demonstrates that I am not one of “those people” whom you wish to shut out of the G+ community. It is also apparent that Google is enforcing a vaguely-written policy that actually increases the risks faced by its subscribers.
- Bruce Byfield, In Defense of Internet Anonymity — Again:
Yet even if the arguments against anonymity were valid, a larger problem is that enforcing a real name policy is impossible for a very simple reason: Inventing a realistic pseudonym is trivial, because checking everybody who signs up would be too inconvenient for both users and an online service.
- Randi Zuckerberg’s Ill-Timed Statements About Anonymity Online:
It turns out that a lot deeply disagree with Zuckerberg’s sweeping condemnation of anonymity on the internet.
- The name game: is Google+ building a cathedral or a bazaar?:
Google sees Google+ very much in terms of the Cathedral model of social networks: It is ordered and controlled. Google knows who you are, where you are, what you are doing, and with whom at any point in time. It is a safe environment for businesses to communicate with their customers.
- (From an earlier linkspam) My Name Is Me: Be Yourself Online. Statements in support of pseudonymity. Share the link, and if you are well-known or respected and support the use of nicknames or pseudonyms online, consider making a statement.
- (From an earlier linkspam) Electronic Frontier Foundation: A Case for Pseudonyms:
It is not incumbent upon strict real-name policy advocates to show that policies insisting on the use of real names have an upside. It is incumbent upon them to demonstrate that these benefits outweigh some very serious drawbacks.
Lots of dedicated discussion and link tracking at googleplus.dreamwidth.org and Botgirl Questi’s collection of #plusgate articles.
Front page image credit: Masked by Harsha K R, Creative Commons Attribution Sharealike.