Facebook has a “real name” policy, so a couple of weeks ago they started to flag accounts of drag queens who were using their stage names on their Facebook accounts. However, fucking with drag queens is foolish, so a shitstorm ensued, culminating with a meeting between Chief Product Officer Chris Cox and Sister Roma, a queer nun who is a member of the Order of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. That’s Sister Roma at left. Then, Facebook ate crow:
Shortly after the meeting, Facebook CPO Chris Cox issued a lengthy apology, in which he admitted the site flagged LGBTQ users’ accounts because of a single user’s reports. He also clarified that as far as Facebook is concerned, “our policy has never been to require everyone on Facebook to use their legal name. 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.” Cox also spoke to the site’s reasons for implementing policies about names and anonymity, adding, “There’s lots of room for improvement in the reporting and enforcement mechanisms, tools for understanding who’s real and who’s not, and the customer service for anyone who’s affected. These have not worked flawlessly and we need to fix that.”
“A single user”–speaking of hot messes, those Facebook assholes sure made one.
Mike J
Meh. They admitted they made a mistake and they mostly fixed it. They didn’t say, “sorry if anybody was offended.”
raven
@Mike J: Well it’s better than a thread about, ew, football.
Keith G
In thirty years of political activism in the gay community in three different cities, one truth remains supreme: Don’t fuck with drag queens.
WereBear
One of the many flaws in Facebook is how easily they will yank something based on ONE hysterical complaint. I know this to be so on political sites; liberal ones are constantly having to reboot because a wingnut got pissy.
Yet, sites which feature animal cruelty just keep perking along, according to the emails I get decrying such indulgence.
Oh Facebook. I don’t worry about you changing, because you probably never will.
Hal
So a single user went around flagging Draw Queens? Was it rick santorum? Also, draw queens are performers. They don’t go everywhere in drag so his comment about the name they use in everyday life is a wrong. Unless you’re rupaul.
NotMax
A song which Facebook now won’t be singing.
Scott S.
This “Real Names” stuff is bullshit anyway. Do you know how many people have accounts listed as JohnAndJane Smith so a couple don’t have to make multiple accounts for each other? And I know others who’ve joined with clearly artificial last names, some for ego-boosting, some to keep employers or malicious family members from tracking them.
sparrow
Let me just say that the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence has certainly brightened my morning. Almost makes me sorry that I have completely given up on the catholic church — those are some awesome people right there.
dr. luba
This they have time and money to pursue, but they can’t develop a search engine that will actually search Timelines and Groups and give you useful results. Or allow File descriptions to be modified? Or allow files or photo albums to be organized in any manner? Really, FB? Really!
(These are the lamentations of a Group Admin.)
Hawise
My gaming friends would be almost all booted off if Facebook actually followed a “real” name policy because I don’t know anyone who has the last name of “Farmville” or Pioneer.
Linda Featheringill
@Scott S.:
I signed up for Facebook using my late mother’s name. So far, I haven’t been struck by lightening.
A Humble Lurker
@Hal:
Eh?
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@raven: raven, you crack me up.
(…Seagrams in a coffee cup –
musical reference to sad song on the 2014 Americana music Awards Album of the year)
scav
@A Humble Lurker: All that springs to my mind is a vision of the necessary documentary evidence needed to prove if your most commonly used real-world name is William, Bill or Billy, let alone the fact that most of your collage friends use “Chumpchange” both to your face and in in passing. Because, apparently it’s not a real-world name unless it’s used 100% of the time in the “real” world. Or something.
NonyNony
@Scott S.:
And then there are the poor guys and gals who keep getting flagged as fake names because their parents were shortsighted. Those poor sods actually named “Michael Hunt” or “Anita Goodman” that everyone thinks are fake.
Hal
@A Humble Lurker: 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.”
I mean that Sister Roma isn’t always in drag. Draw Queens use stage names but they aren’t in drag 24/7 using their drag names and persona.
ruemara
I’ve been under a fake name since the last Oscars. Too bad for Facebook.
karen marie
Given that so many apps require you to give access to FB either to log on to comment or to receive game bonuses, I had to create a second FB account using a made-up name to prevent my “real” account being spammed by the apps posting to my wall every time I sneeze. There are activities I like to engage in that I am not interested in sharing with everyone. It is baffling that FB actually thinks they can police which accounts are “real” and which are not. They should start with simple things, like keeping vendors of cheap sunglasses from spamming the Cockalier group page.
scav
@karen marie: The assumption that we have a single, solitary, real-world persona, known by a single name — especially over time! — is at best simplistic and closer to idiotic.
Julia Grey
@Hal:
I think what they meant to say that it is a name BY WHICH THEY CAN BE IDENTIFIED in real life.
In that sense, even if she isn’t in drag, Sister Roma is Sister Roma and people around her in real life know her as such.
Julia Grey
Facebook has to keep up the fiction that they police their system for real names (recognizable people) otherwise, they’d open the floodgates to all kinds of nonsense sign-ups.
jayboat
@NonyNony:
Ain’t that the truth. The fact that everyoneinthefreakingworld has an account should allow them a little slack.
I think they handled this ok, considering they will NEVER be able to please everyone.
They made a rule, some folks b!tched about it, and then they changed it.
It’s only facebook, jeebus christ on a cookie.
Gex
The part that bothers me is that after meeting with the drag queens and having LGBT groups explain how there are some groups of people who are unevenly targeted by the culture at large, who are more likely to be flagged because in general they are punished by society for their identities, Facebook did not care. They did not change the policy until they realized there was one overzealous hater out there flagging drag queens and queers.
So the lesson for the haters is load balancing. If you manage to spread the load out and have a larger number of people singling out queers for reporting, that would have been fine with Facebook. It absolutely was not a problem to them that they provided a new tool for bigots to attack queers.
zmulls
And these aren’t just “drag queens” — as one poster said upthread, these are the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. They are a very public group in several cities and they do a lot of creative and charitable work in their “naughty nun” guises. It’s not a name they go by in public, it’s like a stage name, or another identity.
I actually heard about this as it was going on, as I’m a friend of Sister Unity Divine.
paul
I thought “Chris Cox” was the drag name.