14 DAY TRIAL // In the past few weeks, there’s been huge uproar over Facebook’s “real-name” policy because a big part of the LGBT community was forced to use their ID names, even though they may not identify with these anymore.
Now, one top Facebook exec has stepped up and apologized for what’s been happening, promising that a solution is in the works.
“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,” starts off Chris Cox, chief product officer.
He explains that in the past couple of weeks they’ve come to understand how the policy affects people and how painful this has been and that Facebook owes everyone a better service and a better experience.
To this extent, Facebook promises to fix the way the policy gets handled so that everyone affected can go back to using Facebook as before.
Cox goes on to explain how all this happened and why it took Facebook 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.”
Since the company’s policy is to ask those who have been flagged to verify they are using their real names by submitting a form of ID, this is what happened to the hundreds of members of the LGBT community that were affected in the past few weeks.
A solution is on the way
Cox says the policy has never been to require everyone on Facebook to use their legal name, but the 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.”
He goes on to explain that this is the fight policy for Facebook for several reasons. On one hand, that’s what made Facebook special in the first place by setting it apart from the rest of the Internet where pseudonymity, anonymity or random names was the norm.
On the other hand, this is also one of the main mechanisms that the company uses to protect millions of people every day.
The company is currently working on better tools to help authenticate everyone in the world while not opening up Facebook to what Cox calls “bad actors.”