I think very nearly 100% of the reason that we've landed on real names for social media is because the dominant companies in social media make their money by ex

I think very nearly 100% of the reason that we've landed on real names for social media is because the dominant companies in social media make their money by extensively profiling their users and selling access to finely tuned selections of them for the purpose of advertising, political engineering, and so on. Encouraging, if not requiring, people to use their real name helps with this end. The interfaces are also designed with this in mind -- encouraging people to post personal information and to reward your 'friends' for doing so. Even using mobile devices as two factor authentication or, increasingly, even to sign up to a service is part of the game. That mobile number immediately usually gives you an substantial amount of demographic information. And in any case also allows for near 100% certainty cross-compiling information between companies who trade and sell your information among each other to generate even more extensive profiles to everybody's benefit. Well, everybody except you.