Not Everything's Coming up Rainbows on Your Facebook Newsfeed

Anyone not living under a rock has seen the plethora of rainbows that has infiltrated Facebook's newsfeed. Everyone from Sen. Elizabeth Warren to Mark Zuckerberg to your grandmother's cat has changed their profile picture to have a rainbow filter by going to this link.

But it isn't all rainbows over at Facebook for people who use aliases or new names on the social media platform. The company's Community Standards "require people to provide the name they use in real life," which sounds reasonable until you realize one of the primary methods of proving your name is to give a driver's license or birth certificate. Not exactly easy if you were named David at birth but you now go by Natasha. It's also difficult if you're a drag queen or burlesque performer trying to use your stage name, a college kid trying to delay coming out to your family back home, or an abused person trying to hide from a stalker. To this last point, a report from the National Network to End Domestic Violence recently found that, of all websites, Facebook is the least safe for women. As the report notes, "Facebook is the hardest for survivors to shut down or avoid because they use it to keep in contact with other friends and family."

To add to all of this, any user can flag another account for using a fake name. In the wrong hands, this can be a weapon. Someone on the Secret app confessed to targeting drag queens for using fake names. Someone else reported to Facebook that her stalker had used the feature to suspend her account.

"Facebook is engaging in this weird, limiting practice of creating bureaucracy where there's no need for bureaucracy," says Andy Bowen, Executive Director of Garden State Equality. "The internet should be a place where people are free to be themselves. That means changing one's name without an intensive name-change verification process. That means not being suspended for using a fake name. That means being able to maintain an online profile while hiding from potential abusers. Facebook should act a little more like 21st century media and not like some stodgy 20th century government."

For those interested in seeing more, the #MyNameIs hashtag is full of stories and images about this, including several of the protest at this weekend's Pride in San Francisco. Take a look, and take Facebook to task for this policy.