Facebook Has Apologised And Backed Down On Its Controversial ‘Real Name’ Policy

Facebook’s Chief Product Officer Chris Cox has issued a lengthy apology to the LGBT community over the company’s controversial ‘real name’ account policy, which has seen drag queens, LGBT activists and transgendered people locked out of their accounts.

“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. 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,” Cox wrote on Facebook earlier today.

“The way this happened took us off guard. An individual on Facebook decided to report several hundred of these accounts as fake. These reports were among the several hundred thousand fake name reports we process every single week, 99 percent of which are bad actors doing bad things: impersonation, bullying, trolling, domestic violence, scams, hate speech, and more — so we didn’t notice the pattern.

“The process we follow has been to ask the flagged accounts to verify they are using real names by submitting some form of ID — gym membership, 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.”

Drag queens and LGBT San Franciscans have been voicing their opposition to the policy, arguing that forcing people to use their real names on Facebook was discriminatory and could lead to people being inadvertently outed, potentially putting them in harm’s way. Facebook’s prior refusal to back down over the policy led to a mini-exodus of LGBT people to Ello, a start-up social network that allows people to use aliases.

 

Cox promised that Facebook was going to start “building better tools for authenticating” drag and LGBT accounts, and thanked the activists who brought the issue to Facebook’s attention.