New Delhi: After the historic ruling by the US Supreme Court, Silicon Valley was one of the happiest lot and the tech giants celebrated the legalization of same-sex marriage with fervor. From tweets, to rainbow filters and Easter eggs; these companies went out of their way in letting the world know how they support the ruling.
Despite having LGBT-friendly policy for employees, in terms of technology Facebook seems to have overlooked the idea of equality.
A trans woman, Zip, who has worked at Facebook writes in her blog on Medium that how her change in identity cost her the virtual identity she had on the world’s largest social network. She explains how she was cut off from her friends, family, and peers on the site because she did not use her legal name and instead used a name people knew her by.
Zip says that she was the one who initiated the custom gender feature on the site and yet, her name- the one she is known by people, including at work, became the reason her account is now defunct. She chose her Facebook name when she began her transition six years ago.
When Facebook demands your real, legal identity, the idea is to drive engagement on the site. If you don’t use a name that other people recognize, you won’t interact so much; this in turn costs the site ad impressions. Since Facebook’s inception back in 2004, people have come a long way with the network which has become synonymous with their existence, albeit a virtual one. This is exactly where the reality collides with the virtual world.
When Facebook formed its policy of encouraging authenticity on the site, it perhaps forgot to take into consideration that people also change their names on the virtual world for the need of safety or because they like to keep their nick names on their profiles, or because they are trans.
Adding to it the ability for others to report ‘fake’ names, online bullies have found a way to kick the marginalized from the virtual world. With the stringent policy around names, Zip says that people are forced to choose between a name they do not identify with or do not want to use, or being disconnected from the site. With Facebook being the largest network for people, businesses, and issues on a single platform, it is not difficult to imagine the implications a simple policy glitch could have on people who have chosen their real identities after creating their virtual ones.
What Facebook needs is not just a way of embossing the rainbow filter on users’ profile pictures, but a change in its policy and a feature, similar to the custom gender option, that allows users to put up the name they largely identify themselves with.
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