Last week, I finally got verified on LinkedIn. Now there's a little badge next to my name that says "yes, she's a human who is legally named Nicole." Their marketing for verification says that I should now expect 60% more profile views and 50% more comments and reactions.

For a writer like me, that seems great. More people viewing my content means more people can learn from me, or be entertained by me. And all that for free?

There's a problem, of course. Nicole is my legal name, so I was able to get verified as a result. But many people don't go by their legal name.

Other names are common

So who doesn't go by their legal name?

I didn't, for years after my wife and I got married. I went by an alias—our hyphenated last name—without legally changing it. I wasn't eligible to get verified then, since that name was not on my ID.

I didn't, when I came out as transgender. It takes time to change your name and update your documents. Until that was complete, I would have had to go by my deadname or lose verification.

And what about women who change their name when they get married, but go by their previous name professionally? This is an alias, and it is their name even though it's not what the government knows them as. But they would lose verification for doing this.

Anyone who goes by a nickname or alias is ineligible. I have many friends who go by a different name than what their ID shows. This isn't fraudulent—it just reflects who they are.

Penalized for being yourself

And yet, if you fall into any case where you cannot get verified, then you can't get the benefits. You can't get your extra profile views and extra comments. Or put another way: you're penalized for not being verified. You'll get about 40% fewer profile views and 33% fewer comments/reactions than people who are verified.

You get marginalized, unable to reap the full benefits of the platform, if you don't conform to a very particular outlook on what a name is (the official sequence of letters on your ID).

To be clear, the problem isn't the verification process itself¹. That process (and its associated benefits) may be in place to deal with bot traffic. I can sympathize with this, and I do want lower bot traffic—it makes platforms much more pleasant to use.

Let us use our names

The problem is that you have to show your legal name to everyone. There should be a process for being verified without it being your legal name on display. This process doesn't have to be scalable if the group that would utilize it is small—since surely they'd only forget about small populations². It can be as simple as filing a help ticket and allowing a human to approve it based on some evidence. Is your name consistent across your public profiles? And you're a human being? Cool, verified.

I believe that LinkedIn can, and should, do better. This feature as implemented is harming marginalized folks who are not able to get the same visibility when they cannot get verified. It reduces the exposure that marginalized creators can get.

You should keep this in mind in the products you make, too. Don't require people to display their legal names. And before you even collect that data, think about what problem you're trying to solve. Do you need to collect legal names to solve that? (Probably not.) If so, do you need to store them after processing once? (Probably not.) And if so, do you need to display them publicly? (Probably not.)

Names are so much more than what the government knows us by. Let us be our true selves and verify us with our true names.