Facebook 
 
 Facebook is working on a way to verify the identities of people who prefer to go by pseudonyms rather than their birth names following pressure from gay rights activists. 
 
 In a post on Facebook on Wednesday, Chief Product Officer Chris Cox apologized to "the community of drag queens, drag kings, transgender" and the members of the LGBT community after the company mistakenly cracked down on their use of fake names. 
 
 "Our policy has never been to require everyone on Facebook to use their legal name," Cox said. "The spirit of our policy is that everyone on Facebook uses the authentic name they use in real life." 
 
 Facebook is building better tools to authenticate "the Sister Romas of the world while not opening up Facebook to bad actors," Cox said. The social network is also working to improve its customer service in an effort to prevent the abrupt dropping of accounts in these situations. 
 
 The move is a major milestone for Facebook's "real-name" policy, which until now required that anyone using the social network had to identify themselves by the same designation they had on a government-issued identification card. For most people, this isn't a problem, and for married people who want to display their married name, Facebook has already created a feature to do that. 
 
 It also isn't the first time Facebook has changed its identity policies. Earlier this year, Facebook expanded the options people can use to define their gender beyond "male" and "female." But this move changes a core feature of Facebook, its focus on true identify for the Web. 
 
 Facebook and identity 
 
 Facebook's real-name policy has always had its critics, particularly in the gay community, which has often argued that transgender people and those who take on a pseudonym for political or religious purposes are disproportionally affected by the company's rules. 
 
 The issue came to a head recently when Facebook began suspending accounts that ran afoul of its policy. Among them was Michael Williams, a gay rights activist who lives in San Francisco. He dresses in drag and goes by the pseudonym "Sister Roma" as part of a group called the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. 
 
 In an open letter, Williams and his group explained that the real name policy can lead to harassment. People such as transgender people, who can't legally change their names, domestic violence survivors and refugees from other countries, need to be able use pseudonyms in order to communicate with friends, the group said. 
 
 "All people should feel safe using their preferred identity when speaking, online or off," the group wrote. 
 
 Politicians in recent weeks have also begun putting pressure on Facebook to change its policies. 
 
 The controversy "took us off guard," Cox said. 
 
 Rival social networks, such as Ello, saw an uptick in usage by people who disagreed with Facebook's rules. ||||| After weeks of backlash over Facebook’s real name policy, namely from members of the LGBT community who have had their Facebook pages suspended due to drag names, Facebook has met with members of the community and apologized for any hardship they might have caused. 
 
 Facebook’s VP of Product Chris Cox made a statement today on Facebook apologizing (on behalf of the company, it seems) for any pain caused, and explaining how this situation came to be. The statement also included promises to improve the current real name policy to include all different types of people without risking the safety of other users. 
 
 You can read the whole post below, but the gist of the explanation goes as follows: 
 
 A single user flagged hundreds of Facebook pages of drag queens (BI reports that a Secret user has claimed responsibility for this) for using fake names, and as part of standard operating procedure, Facebook did a sweep of the profiles without realizing the attack pattern against drag queens using drag names on their Facebook profiles. 
 
 However, Facebook met with a group of people from the LGBT community today to discuss ways to make the system better. 
 
 This will include “better tools for authenticating the Sister Romas of the world while not opening up Facebook to bad actors,” along with taking further “measures to provide much more deliberate customer service to those accounts that get flagged so that we can manage these in a less abrupt and more thoughtful way.” 
 
 Thank you @facebook for listening to community. Greatly appreciate your willingness to listen & respond to concerns. pic.twitter.com/a3NUUlPUdx — David Campos (@DavidCamposSF) October 1, 2014 
 
 Here’s a copy of the full statement from Cox: ||||| This is a set of web collections curated by Mark Graham using the Archive-IT service of the Internet Archive. They include web captures of the ISKME.org website as well as captures from sites hosted by IGC.org.These web captures are available to the general public.For more information about this collection please feel free to contact Mark via Send Mail
– Victory for Sister Roma, Lil Miss Hot Mess, and hundreds of other drag queens who had fallen afoul of Facebook's "real name" policy: The company says it will ease up on the policy and they can carry on using their stage names. The drag queens had their accounts suspended and were asked to authenticate their names, which a Facebook exec says happened after a single user reported the Facebook pages of hundreds of drag queens for violating the name policy, TechCrunch reports. "Our policy has never been to require everyone on Facebook to use their legal name," the exec said in a Facebook post. "The spirit of our policy is that everyone on Facebook uses the authentic name they use in real life." Sister Roma and other gay rights activists had argued that Facebook's insistence on using their real names could lead to harassment, CNET reports. But the Facebook exec who announced that the policy would be eased also said the real-name policy is a "very powerful force for good" when used to combat online bullying and anonymous attacks, and while the policy won't be abandoned, Facebook will take more steps to understand the situation when a user is reported for using a fake name, reports the New York Times. (Invite-only social media site Ello, meanwhile, doesn't require people use their real names and is growing fast.)