Facebook Apologizes to Drag Queens

In a blog post, Facebook Chief Product Officer Chris Cox apologized to “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.”

(Disclosure: Facebook provides financial support to ConnectSafely.org, a non-profit Internet safety organization where I serve as co-director)

A few weeks ago Facebook suspended the accounts of individuals for using fake names. Facebook has a “real name culture” and while it doesn’t require that your Facebook name necessarily be your legal name, it does try to make sure that people represent themselves as who they really are. If Facebook gets a report that someone is using a fake name, they do an investigation and if it appears that they’re not using their real name, the profile is suspended.  One of the processes is to determine if the name looks like a real name, which could be a problem is one’s name is “Sister Roma” or “Lil Miss Hot Mess” and another process involves asking the person to send in a photo ID or perhaps a library card, gym membership or piece of mail. But, for these two individuals, that really is the name they go by. It may not be the name on their birth certificate, but it’s the nevertheless the way they identify themselves.

According to Cox, “An individual on Facebook decided to report several hundred of these accounts as fake,” and the company’s support staff processed them along with the “several hundred thousand fake name reports we process every single week.” Cox pointed out that 99% of these cases turn out to be “bad actors doing bad things: impersonation, bullying, trolling, domestic violence, scams, hate speech, and more,” and that the company” didn’t notice the pattern.

Cox wrote that “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. Part of what’s been so difficult about this conversation is that we support both of these individuals, and so many others affected by this, completely and utterly in how they use Facebook.”
Click here to read the post.