Native American activists are suing Facebook over site's “real-name” policy. Dana Lone Hill, a member of the Lakota Nation, has been repeatedly shut out from the site because the social network has asked her to prove again and again that her name is, in fact, genuine.
The policy says that users must use their real names. Native American names often take cues from natural landmarks, animals or characteristics, and don’t sound like the US’ mainstream European stock names—raising flags (presumably automated) in the Facebook system.
Facebook’s identification options include showing two forms of identification that include a legal name and one piece of government-issued identification with a photo or birthday that matches the user's profile.
Lone Hill told the Guardian newspaper that she is just one of many Native Americans who have had this problem, and so she’s looking to head up a class action lawsuit against the internet giant.
After facing backlash on the name policy from LGBT groups last fall, Facebook issued an apology and explained, “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.”
At the time, it vowed changes, but the changes have not come quickly enough for some tastes.
“They have made it very clear that they don’t want to share how enforcement works because they think people will game the system,” said Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) activist Nadia Kayyali, who said that she has discussed the policy with Facebook in private meetings. She argued that the policy is especially harmful to groups like LGBT youth, abuse survivors and political activists.
“If you continue to have ‘this account is using a fake name’ as a reporting option, that seems like you are encouraging people to just be harassing people by filing these reports as opposed to dealing with the behavior itself,” said Kayyali. “So they should really just get rid of the policy.”
That policy, which formerly required users to use only their "real name" for their profiles (it's now the "authentic" name policy), last year faced an intense backlash from drag queens, drag kings, and others in the LGBT (lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender) community, some of whom it had locked out of their accounts because their account names weren't "real."
Facebook eventually restored Lone Hill's account, just as, in October 2014, it restored the accounts of drag queens, amended its policy and apologized, owning up to a policy that ignored the importance of using pseudonyms online to protect people from harassment, violence and government action.