{"id":3675,"date":"2016-09-09T16:58:21","date_gmt":"2016-09-09T21:58:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.psafe.com\/en\/blog\/?p=3675"},"modified":"2018-07-28T22:43:51","modified_gmt":"2018-07-29T02:43:51","slug":"high-school-kids-changing-facebook-names","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.psafe.com\/en\/blog\/high-school-kids-changing-facebook-names\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Were High School Kids Changing Their Facebook Names?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It\u2019s only natural that juniors and seniors in high school \u2014 stressed with school, jobs, and college applications \u2014 want to blow off a little steam. But in the early years of the 2010s, students also worried that colleges to which they applied might browse their Facebook pages while reviewing admissions packages. While most colleges said they didn\u2019t review high school kids\u2019 social media pages before admission, the senior name changing tradition became hugely popular anyway. By 2012, for example, there were 83 million fake accounts on the social media site.<\/p>\n<p>High school juniors and seniors first starting changing their Facebook names when they thought that college admissions representatives were cruising their pages for admissions red flags. When asked, however, most college admissions officers said they didn\u2019t look through students\u2019 Facebook pages before admitting them, although some mentioned that they did peruse social media before admission.<\/p>\n<p><strong><a href=\"https:\/\/www.psafe.com\/en\/blog\/use-facebook-app-like-pro\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Read More: How To Use The Facebook App Like a Pro<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Whether or not students were really being watched by admissions counselors, they still changed their Facebook names starting in their junior years to be safe. Most of the students simply changed their first names to spellings that weren\u2019t standard. For example, \u201cAmy\u201d was changed to \u201cAim E.\u201d Other students used nicknames to throw off the college admissions counselors\u2019 trail. The tradition stuck, whether or not students really believed their pages were being considered in their applications.<\/p>\n<p>Name changing for college admissions came to an abrupt halt in October 2014, however, when Facebook implemented its \u201creal name policy.\u201d A person\u2019s real name \u2014 defined as a name that would be listed on a credit card, student ID, or driver\u2019s license \u2014 was required to be a member of the social networking site. Today, the only way that a Facebook user can use an alternate name on Facebook is to provide specifics of a special need to use a pseudonym. Today\u2019s high school juniors and seniors likely will not qualify: hiding from college admissions counselors is not a reason likely to be accepted by Facebook.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It\u2019s hard to maintain a professional image online. That\u2019s why high school students used fake names to hide from colleges until recently.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":83,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[146,2503,2506,421,290],"class_list":["post-3675","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-privacy","tag-facebook","tag-fake-names","tag-high-school-kids","tag-social-media","tag-social-networks"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v28.2 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Why Were High School Kids Changing Their Facebook Names? - PSafe Blog<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Why Were High School Kids Changing Their Facebook Names?\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.psafe.com\/en\/blog\/high-school-kids-changing-facebook-names\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Why Were High School Kids Changing Their Facebook Names? 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