Queen don't compute: reading and casting shade on Facebook's real names policy

ABSTRACT Throughout the fall of 2014 and the summer of 2015, activists mobilized against Facebook's real names policy. Finding themselves locked out of their accounts, they were outraged when Facebook deemed their identities not “real.” Organizing protests and branding their activism through hashtags and viral campaigns, the #MyNameIs activists represented a diverse set of users such as the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (LGBT) community, sex workers, and Indigenous peoples. Although media coverage constructed this as a problem of exclusion, we see this as a case of how non-normative identities are punished when they disrupt the collection of personal information. Using approaches from queer theory, internet studies, surveillance scholarship, and social theory, we argue that real names policies are not about promoting safety but about rendering users transparent to markets and the state. Turning to artistic and tactical interventions, we propose a queer engagement that troubles surveillance, rejects technocratic solutions, and challenges liberal discourses of inclusion.