Your name is your name, even if it’s not your real name. That’s the message Facebook’s chief product officer, Chris Cox, sent in a statement on Wednesday (October 1) explaining the company’s reversal of its controversial “real name” policy.
“I want to apologize to the affected community of drag queens, drag kings, transgender, and extensive community of our friends, neighbors, and members of the LGBT community for the hardship that we’ve put you through in dealing with your Facebook accounts over the past few weeks,” Cox said. The mea culpa came a few weeks after Sister Roma, a well-known member of San Francisco’s beloved Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence drag group questioned the policy after being locked out of her account.
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What Was That Whole Thing Even About?
Once Roma raised the alarm, other drag performers and people who use alternate names on FB said they’d had similar issues, banding together under the #mynameis hashtag to protest the policy. They said it not only discriminated against the LGBT community, but also potentially put stalking and domestic violence victims at risk by forcing them to use their legal names.
“In the two weeks since the real-name policy issues surfaced, we’ve had the chance to hear from many of you in these communities and understand the policy more clearly as you experience it,” Cox said. “We’ve also come to understand how painful this has been. We owe you a better service and a better experience using Facebook, and we’re going to fix the way this policy gets handled so everyone affected here can go back to using Facebook as you were.”
We Screwed Up, Now We’re Fixing It
Cox explained that the backlash caught FB off guard and that the policy was announced after someone “decided to report several hundred of these accounts as fake.” He said FB gets “several hundred thousand” fake name reports every week, “99 percent of which are bad actors doing bad things: impersonation, bullying, trolling, domestic violence, scams, hate speech…” Not noticing a pattern, FB did what it has done for more than a decade: it asked the account holders to verify they were using real names by submitting some form of ID — anything from a gym membership to a library card or piece of mail.
“We’ve had this policy for over 10 years, and until recently it’s done a good job of creating a safe community without inadvertently harming groups like what happened here,” he said.
Use Whatever Name You Want — Seriously, Lil Miss Hot Mess, Go Ahead
Facebook
While FB has prided itself on being a place where pseudonyms and anonymity aren’t the norm, Cox said it has never been the company’s policy to require every use to post under their legal name. “The spirit of our policy is that everyone on Facebook uses the authentic name they use in real life. For Sister Roma, that’s Sister Roma. For Lil Miss Hot Mess, that’s Lil Miss Hot Mess,” he said, adding that there’s lots of room for improvement of the policy and communicating to the site’s users about potential issues with their accounts.
The Transgender Law Center released a statement on Wednesday reacting to the apology. “We had a very productive meeting with Facebook today in which they apologized for the way this situation has been handled, and they committed to making changes to the way they enforce their ‘real names’ policy to ensure that folks who need to use chosen names that reflect their authentic selves online are able to do so,” read the statement. “What was made clear today is that Facebook is ready to collaborate with our communities and shares our value of making sure everyone is able to safely be their authentic self online.”
Bottom line: the policy was not great and it’s being fixed thanks to input from users like Sister Roma. In the future such requests will be done in a “less abrupt and more thoughtful way.”
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