The Nameless Coaltion, a global alliance of women’s groups, LGBTQ groups, human rights and digital rights groups has asked Facebook to abandon its “Real Names” policy, which puts Facebook users in danger of reprisals including state violence, stalkers, and on-the-job harassment.
Facebook insists that its users use the name on their government-issued ID, even when its users are, for example, women who are in hiding from abusive ex-partners. The policy has allowed vigilante harassers to target specific groups, such as trans people and drag-queens, and turn them in to Facebook management for not using their “real” names, which results in their accounts being terminated.
The open letter to Facebook is available for your sign-on.
I don’t use Facebook or its products. I view the company’s business practices as deceptive and dangerous, and believe that its goal is to marginalize the open Web, migrating all attention and publishing to its walled garden, where it can exercise arbitrary, algorithmic policies to stifle some discourse while elevating some others, without any recourse or rule of law apart from its ever-changing, one-sided, take-it-or-leave it EULA.
If those reasons weren’t enough to convince you that Facebook makes the world worse, perhaps this is.