Always Show Your Real Face Online

When a new employee starts I ask them to upload a portrait shot of their faces for every account they use internally at my company. Not a picture of their dog, not a picture of the beach, and not a picture of their favourite anime character. A picture of them.

I request them to add a portrait shot of their face because of the wise words of one of my professors in America said to me long ago:

If you do not author any document with your full name then I will refuse to read it.

Why would he refuse to read a document without an author? He reasoned that if someone fails to author a document with their name they must lack a sense of pride for what they wrote and want to hide from accountability. Therefore, he refuses to waste his precious time to read it.

When a person writes their full name it holds them accountable to the material they wrote. A dog tag of sorts. I wholeheartedly agree with my professor and utilise the same logic with profile pictures.

In the online world I see many people write horrible things authored by fake aliases and accompanied with profile pictures of dogs, cats, famous people, and other nonsensical images.

Anyone that uses a social media platform will understand what I intend. Sure, people write terrible things with their full name and a profile picture of their face, but at least they assume full responsibility and accountable for what they wrote.

I call people with fake names and fake profile pictures online the wind. You feel it but do not see it. They say hurtful things that cause destruction but no one sees the culprit, instead they hide behind the veil of anonymity.

At my company I ensure every employee, intern, or contractor utilises their full name and portrait headshot of their face for internal and external accounts they use.

As a remote software company I am more serious about this because the majority of communication happens online. We meet face to face rarely, we hold almost no meetings, and conduct close to zero video calls. Not by accident, we designed the company in this manner for reasons I shall explain in another post.

In our online communications I want to emulate the real world where people take responsibility for what exits from their mouth. Everyone pays closer attention to what they say or write when the veil of anonymity is pulled away.

I am Sav Tripodi, here is my face, I wrote this blog post on the 21st of October 2024, I am held accountable and take full responsibility for the contents of this blog post, no veil of anonymity here.