From the archive. First published in November 2015. Rewritten for clarity, with a note on what happened afterwards.
Facebook revised its real name policy in 2015 after sustained pressure from civil liberties groups. The rule was never that you had to use your legal name. It was that you had to use the name people know you by, and the enforcement of that distinction was inconsistent and frequently unfair to people with good reasons for using another name.
Why this belongs on a page trading site
Because a page has no login of its own. Control runs through personal profiles, and personal profiles are subject to identity rules. That connects two things most people treat as unrelated.
- If a personal profile is actioned over identity, every page it controls is at risk. This is the single strongest argument for multiple admins on separate accounts and for owning pages through a business portfolio.
- Identity verification has grown rather than shrunk. Meta’s recovery flows now use document checks and in some cases selfie video.
- That cuts both ways. Attackers routinely harvest passport and licence photographs in phishing campaigns, which means a thief holding your documents can contest an identity based recovery against you.
Practical implications
Keep the profile that controls your pages clean, verified and unremarkable. Do not run business assets from an account with an identity problem waiting to happen. And if you are buying, remember that you are depending on the seller’s profile remaining in good standing for the period around the handover.
The security detail is in how pages get stolen.
Thinking of selling?
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