social media heads are crazy. i think its an addiction powered by the network effect, so it overrides logic.
i'm a weirdo, so the first time facebook checkpointed my account and requested me to upload a photo ID (after probably 10+ years), i deleted my account. and promptly deleted all of my accounts from the meta family of social media products. it was difficult to establish new habits online and maintain communication with others, but it was not impossible.
but my accounts always have had a fake name and was populated with bogus info. identifiable photos of me were very rare. i used it to post memes to my small group of actual friends and stay connected to invitations to social functions. i came up under an earlier form of the internet, where everybody was a crazy, mean asshole and giving out identifying information to the public was absurd. anonymity was synonymous with security.
obviously as the internet became the dominant communication and commerce platform, i started providing identifiable information to specific accounts on certain platforms, but i always wanted to keep my socializing and amusement at least partially decoupled from my identity. i always thought it was weird how many people wanted to constantly take photos of their faces, locations, interests and then dump them online attached to their names. if i voiced a concern, i was treated as a conspiracy brain.
all that sharing was wildly common among the old heads and the younger set, but i was in that weird place/time for the US where i came of age as the internet went from academic nerd shit to popular thing. i was a young teen getting on the internet and the adults--who didn't use the internet--said, "don't identify yourself on the internet, it's dangerous!" 10 years later, those same exact people were uploading pictures of their homes, faces, kids, cars, and sharing their full names & birthdays because it was supposedly all safe now according to the megawealthy people that owned everything we uploaded.
i think all the check pointing and increasingly invasive identification systems will push away some portion of users from the platforms that require them, but it will continue to be a minority... the paranoids, the survivors of stalkers/abusers, the politically oppressed, and the weirdos who balk at the value proposition of enshittifying platforms.
Good news! We will soon get there
