Changing your name on facebook is easy. I hear it is common when high school students apply for college. The site works best with your real social graph, imho, but it is easy to enhance your calm re: privacy
All name changes have to be approved before they go into effect, at least from what I remember.
They actually have human reviewers approve every change. If the name seems fake, they deny the request.
I read an article once about people with fake-sounding but real last names like Batman, etc. having their name change requests denied, and needing to convince Facebook employees of their own identity. They have gone to great lengths to ensure their data on you is tied to a real name.
Yes, they confirm name changes, but I don't think they're very strict about it. Some anecdotal evidence:
My Facebook middle name is Emacs. It used to be 'emacs'.
I have three friends who share a Facebook account, which is probably against the TOS anyway. They change the name rather frequently. Last month they were named Krishanu Coke Zero Austin Steve.
They actually have human reviewers approve every change. If the name seems fake, they deny the request.
I have a number of quite odd and very apparent pseudonyms among my Facebook friends. Most are married women with children, who have some well known reasons to desire more online privacy than young single men. I don't know how those names were approved. My entirely real name on Facebook took a long time to get approved when I initially opened my Facebook account, which I thought was quite silly.
My guess would be that they have a blacklist of well-known celebrity and fictional character names that gets your request flagged for further review. Misspellings might avoid triggering the blacklist.
