For the first time in three years, users who have profiles which don’t use their real names will no longer have to worry about getting banned.
In an unexpected Google+ post today, it was announced that the long-standing name policy, which disallowed the use of fake names on profiles, was apparently so confusing and undesired that it has been removed completely. Check out the full details below for the announcement!
The restriction on names has been in place since the early days of Google+. Its purpose was, at least in part, to create a community which discouraged the use of anonymity as a tool to harass or troll other people without accountability. It also helped establish a social network full of real-life people instead of spam pages and proxies.
On the other hand, anonymity offers protection and security to some people who feel uncomfortable making everything they do on Google products publicly linked to their real-life name. In particular, a huge number of YouTube users wanted to keep their usernames on Google+ but because the Pages feature had not been released, they had few options.
Because the ban affected a significant portion of Google’s users, it has been met (especially at the beginning) with a notable amount of hostility and frustration. Many people have pointed out, quite fairly, that the policy was not entirely effective to begin with: users could still pick whatever name they wanted, so long as it sounded real enough to pass through Google’s unknown screening process. If a troll tried to register their name as something like “Karkat Vantas,” for example, Google’s filters would accept that name as real.
Now it seems that Google has, in some ways, already fulfilled the purpose of the restriction: Google+ has a massive user base consisting largely of real people, the ability to create Pages for non-individual entities, and a feature allowing YouTube users to carry over their account names when they sign up for Google+.
Whether or not the ban was instrumental in minimizing the presence of trolls and spammers, it seems as if Google+’s spam detection algorithms and reporting systems are good enough to stand on their own (at least in the eyes of Google employees). In a comment on the announcement post, +Yonatan Zunger responded to fears that the ban lift would increase the number of unpleasant users:
“Oh, don't worry. One of the reasons this is safe to launch is that our troll-smashing department has gotten very good at their jobs. :)”
This small change holds the possibility of having far-reaching changes to Google+ as a community. The worst case scenario is that hostility and spam will increase as trolls can protect themselves behind aliases, but Google is confident that will not happen. On the flip side, the change could bring a whole new wave of users to the social network who didn't want to use it with their real names before.
Either way, today’s news seems to be another step in whatever new direction Google+ is headed since Vic Gundotra left Google earlier this year. Where exactly that new direction may be, we can only wait to find out.
What do you think of today’s increased profile freedom? Will you be changing your name? Let us know in the comments!