Facebook apologizes to drag queens and LGBT community over real-name controversy

Facebook Inc. apologized to drag queens and the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community after an outcry over the social network's policy of requiring members to use real names for their accounts on its service.

The company, which from its founding has focused on authentic identities instead of allowing anonymous activity, drew criticism after it locked out some users going by their drag names, leading to complaints that the inability to use a pseudonym could compromise individuals' safety and privacy.

According to a statement Wednesday by Facebook chief product officer Chris Cox, the company was caught off-guard when someone reported several hundred of these accounts as fake, triggering a process that requires users to validate their names with some form of identification, like library cards, mail or gym memberships, which can be difficult for those who go by pseudonyms.

The company, whose authentic-name policy is meant to protect members by avoiding impersonation, bullying, hate speech and scams, now realizes that the resulting events put these users through a hardship, and Facebook will fix the way the identification policy is handled, Cox wrote in a post on the site.

"The spirit of our policy is that everyone on Facebook uses the authentic name they use in real life," Cox wrote. "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."

REAL IDENTITIES

Menlo Park, California-based Facebook has built its business -- which has grown to more than 1 billion users -- on real identity, with a recent advertising product that promises "people-based marketing."

Chief executive Mark Zuckerberg started the service at a time when most Web activity was anonymous, and he once told David Kirkpatrick, author of "The Facebook Effect," that "having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity."

This year, Zuckerberg has softened his stance, and has said there should be many ways to communicate. Facebook's Instagram photo-sharing mobile application, for example, allows pseudonyms.

"We see through this event that there's lots of room for improvement in the reporting and enforcement mechanisms, tools for understanding who's real and who's not," Cox wrote. "With this input, we're already under way building better tools for authenticating the Sister Romas of the world while not opening up Facebook to bad actors."