After two weeks of pressure from San Francisco’s drag queens and others who have adopted names that aren’t their legal ones, Facebook agreed Wednesday to modify its policies requiring individual users to operate their accounts under their real names. The company said it would reinstate the names preferred by hundreds of performers and lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people whose identities had been questioned in recent weeks.
But Facebook, the world’s largest social network with nearly 1.3 billion active monthly users, was vague about what broader exceptions it would actually allow to its real-name policy.
In a Facebook post, Chris Cox, the company’s chief product officer, apologized to those recently affected by Facebook’s enforcement of the policy. “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,” he said.
But Mr. Cox went on to explain why real names were important to Facebook, noting that it differentiated the service from the rest of the Internet, where pseudonyms are common, and tended to protect people from bullying, trolling and other threats from anonymous attackers. “This policy, on balance, and when applied carefully, is a very powerful force for good,” he wrote.
So Facebook is not going to abandon its general insistence on real names.
The company has not yet figured out what exactly would change, but its name enforcement procedures are definitely at the top of the list. When a name is reported as fake, the company will take extra steps to understand why the name is being used and make a more active decision about whether to allow it.
“Facebook apologized to the community and has committed to removing any language requiring that you use your legal name,” David Campos, a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors who has championed the issue, wrote on Facebook after meeting with company officials on Wednesday. “They’re working on technical solutions to make sure that nobody has their name changed unless they want it to be changed and to help better differentiate between fake profiles and authentic ones.”
Of course, the open secret of Facebook is that many of the names used are not real. The company typically doesn’t question the name chosen by a user unless someone complains. Only then does it require a proof of identity.
In the case of the drag queens, performers like Sister Roma and Lil Miss Hot Mess had used their stage names without incident for some time. Then, recently, someone decided to report several hundred of the accounts as fake, Mr. Cox said. That set off Facebook’s automatic authentication process, which had little tolerance for complex situations.
“With this input, we’re already underway building better tools for authenticating the Sister Romas of the world while not opening up Facebook to bad actors,” Mr. Cox wrote.
Related:
Drag Performers Fight Facebook’s ‘Real Name’ Policy
Activists argue that a Facebook policy excludes those who prefer to choose their names and exposes them to cyberbullying.