After weeks of staying quiet, Facebook finally has something to say about the incident involving drag queens having their accounts suspended.
Facebook posted an apology on the social network on Oct. 1 addressed to those in the greater LGBT community who were impacted by its 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," Facebook's Chief Product Officer Chris Cox wrote in a Facebook post.
The social network made headlines a few weeks ago when it was revealed that it was more strictly enforcing its real-name policy and suspending the accounts of users who didn't use their real names. This especially affected drag queens and other members of the LGBT community, such as transgender people, who often list names other than their legal names in their profiles.
This caused a bit of controversy (OK, a lot) on the Internet and inspired online petitions to allow users to list names other than their real names on the social network. The outrage was so great at one point that many suspected drag queens, members of the LGBT community and artists were all leaving Facebook in droves to join the new and supposedly more lax social network Ello, which reportedly had 31,000 people an hour sign up for invitations to join the site. Though some thought this exodus was overblown, you can't help but wonder if Facebook genuinely felt threatened by it and if it prompted the company's apology at all.
Drag queens, LGBT advocates and San Francisco supervisor David Campos actually met with Facebook on Oct. 1 to discuss the company's real-name policy. The apology was posted shortly after that meeting took place.
Facebook said the accounts were suspended as the result of someone reporting several hundred of them as fake, and the company didn't notice a pattern in the reports. The company asks the users behind flagged accounts to verify their name by providing some sort of ID.
Facebook reaffirmed its real-name policy in its apology, saying that it has been misinterpreted during the recent controversy. "Our policy has never been to require everyone on Facebook to use their legal name," Cox wrote. "The spirit of our policy is that everyone on Facebook uses the authentic name they use in real life." Cox explained that the policy is a way to differentiate Facebook from other sites that allow the use of any name and to protect users from "real harm," such as "mass impersonation, trolling, domestic abuse, and higher rates of bullying and intolerance," which people often do behind the guise of a fake name. The social network's real-name policy currently states, "The name you use should be your real name as it would be listed on your credit card, driver's license or student ID."
We'll have to wait and see if this clarity helps make the policy more acceptable to Facebook users.
