What is a Display Name on Social Media?
A display name is a piece of arbitrary text that is shown (displayed) as your name on social media websites, i.e. as the name of your profile.
In general, the only purpose a display name has is to be displayed on your profile. It may also be used when searching for a profile by name, but that's it. No program ever uses the display name for anything else, therefore there are no technical rules about what a display name may contain, although there may rules in the terms of service against using display names that contain slurs, for example.
What is the Difference Between a Display Name and an Username?
Display names are different from usernames and handles. An username or handle has a technical function in the program of a social media website: it must uniquely identify an user or profile, and often it must also become part of a URL to access the respective profile page. This means the username or handle is a text code for the program to process, and not arbitrary, free-form text.
Often, this means you can't use spaces in an username or handle, and you can't use accented characters or CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) characters, and sometimes you can't even have an username that is made entirely of digits, starts with a digit, contains a dash or contains an underscore, and certainly not parentheses or slashes. Meanwhile, a display name has no purpose as a text code, so you can write whatever you want in your display name.
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