[fudged]

Arguments against the Real Name policy are valid if all your thoughts, opinions, and actions all funnel through that one social network. In reality, however, there are many alternate forums for expressing your views with varying levels of anonymity, and I think that's a good thing! The freedom to choose anonymity between forums is great. I'm glad that certain networks stick to a real name policy.

[rbarooah]

This is not quite correct. It's not a binary. The existence of one weak alternative network wouldn't be enough. We need an actual plurality of active networks.

These issues are real when you have large organizations like Google and Facebook who stand a reasonable chance of extinguishing a significant part of the diversity.