San Francisco’s Pride Parade decries Facebook’s “authentic name” policy

http://www.businessinsider.com.au/lgbt-protest-against-facebook-2015-6

The protest goes back to the fact that Facebook still requires users to register with “authentic names” and provide identification if asked, or face being locked out of their accounts.

It’s a policy which many claim is discriminatory towards the LGBT community, whose members may go by nicknames or pseudonyms for safety. One former Facebook employee who is transgender, Zip, says her account was recently shut down due to a name conflict and wrote about the issue on Medium.

“Names are a tool for description, a shorthand for quickly communicating the idea of a person or thing,” Zip wrote on Medium. “They change based on context. Each person has many names, because each person has many contexts and social groups. Like the government, Facebook tries to warp all of these contexts into one identifier. And like the government, it demands the final say in what you are called.”