I'm always amazed by the lack of historical perspective that "real name" policies entail. Like, holy shit, how many historical people used pseudonyms well before the internet because impactful speech can be a very dangerous thing to the speaker. And yes I know you can be anonymous on Quora, but that's only useful if you trust that no government entities can lean on Quora for information. (HINT: shouldn't trust that).
Just let people run with the identities they choose. There's nothing special about a name.
I don't think they're designed to dissuade people from deliberately using fake names.
They're designed to encourage people who causally use pseudonyms just for the fun of it to use their real name instead. The reason for that is just to have a better identification key to use when selling access to your data to advertisers.
To put it bluntly, most these companies probably don't have any reason care if that process also makes their service a PITA for people who don't have names like Bob Smith. With very high probability, those people don't live in countries their customers are trying to target with ads.
I just really can't buy that real name policies are meant to dissuade abuse. Not when you've got so many cases like Milo Yiannopulos being allowed to get away with chasing women all around the Internet under his real name, in accordance with real name policies, for such a long time.
Yeah I usually opt for some minority subculture to get past this stuff - ie facebook wouldnt interfere with the adjective middle name meme if you were black - or if that doesn't work I then guilt trip tech companies into being aware of minority group naming patterns, or if that doesnt work I tell them Ill call (or actually contact) washington post to give them the monthly reminder about how little perspective they get from other ethnic groups
Its pretty successful
But you can also just order fake ids on darknet for web site verifications
I doubt you need an actual fake ID to get past social networking ID verification. A cell phone picture of your driver's license where you hamfistedly change the name and some digits in the number in Photoshop should be good enough for 99.9% of cases.
Just let people run with the identities they choose. There's nothing special about a name.