Drag Queens Protest Facebook’s Name Policy

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In addition to all of the complaints over privacy concerns and bogus ad links on users’ timelines, Facebook is now facing possibly its biggest threat yet from one group of people who no one should ever piss off – Drag Queens.

Call them drag queens or female impersonators, these men sometimes prefer to go by their stage names. As such, many want to use those names for their Facebook pages, but the company does not want to allow them to do so since it requires its users to use only their real names.

So Facebook has been deleting the accounts of people who have used such names instead of their real ones because it says that they were guilty of violating its guidelines. This is only a recent effort by the company to enforce a long standing policy.

After having received many complaints, Facebook officially refused to change its mind.

So yesterday a group of drag queens held a press conference at San Francisco’s city hall.

Harris David, who was forced to drop his stage name of “Lil Miss Hot Mess” told NBC News, “Their policy is to provide a safe environment, but we feel that by requiring people to use their legal names it makes people more unsafe by opening them up to attacks.”

The press conference came after the group met privately with Facebook executives at its San Francisco headquarters. They had originally intended to stage a protest there, but agreed not to once Facebook agreed to the meeting.

The drag queens were told that if they wish to use their stage names then they will need to create separate pages like the ones that businesses and groups use which differ from the standard personal pages.

While most people might be thinking, “what’s the big deal? It’s just Facebook, ” the protesters feel that it has become central to their everyday lives. As a result, they think that it is not so simple to just stop using Facebook.