More groveling to LGBT whiners

There is no more leveling a policy than requiring people to be who they are. If, as a certain Russian-born philosopher once said, a thing is itself and constrained by its nature, you are defined by a single characteristic above all else: Your legal, given name. Your legal identity is you, and any policy that requires you to identify yourself by who you really are would seem to apply to all individuals equally. In the increasingly intertwined worlds of "social justice" activism and social media, however, all animals are equal ... but some are more equal than others.

Such is the case on Facebook. The site's management recently apologized for its "real name" policy, enforced in September of this year. When the popular social media network told users they must use their real, legal names, members protested by substituting a purple square bearing the hashtag phrase "#MYNAMEIS" for their photo avatars. The unintended consequence of the real-name policy is that it offended members of the sainted "Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender (LGBT)" community, who must never be offended or criticized for any reason in modern society (lest they have a collective tantrum and start screaming "hate").

Facebook's management simply did not take into account people who do not use their real names but who are wedded to the personas they have adopted. "Facebook began flagging profiles after someone reported hundreds of drag queen accounts," alleges Hannah-Laura Rudolph. (Just who this "someone" is supposed to have been, or how they would possibly have combed Facebook's hundreds of millions of daily users to identify so-called "drag queens," is not clear.) "They asked flagged users to verify their identities and change their account name, or their account would be deactivated."

By the first of October, Facebook's chief product officer, Christopher Cox, had posted a mea culpa to his blog. "I want to apologize to the affected community of drag queens, drag kings, transgender and extensive community of our friends, neighbors, and members of the LGBT community for the hardship that we've put you through in dealing with your Facebook accounts of the past few weeks," Rudolph quotes him. The fact that Facebook is a free, privately owned site, membership in which is completely voluntarily and subject to the site owners' terms of service, seems to have been lost in the furor over the "hardship" that is using your legal name (the same legal name the affected "drag kings" and "drag queens" use when, say, opening bank accounts, registering to vote, or applying for student loans).

Whether through cultural attrition or as part of the backlash created by its politically incorrect missteps, Facebook may be losing members. The Business Insider says that Instagram has increased its lead over Facebook among teenagers. "Three in every four teens say they use the photo- and video-sharing app [Instragram], compared to less than half who say they use Facebook," writes Cooper Smith. "This suggests that teens are leaving Facebook, Twitter, and other traditional social networks for more visual-oriented sharing apps."

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One of the sites to which youth are fleeing is supposed to be Ello, an ad-free social network that does not require real names – and which is said to be garnering a great deal of traffic from young people abandoning Facebook. The story goes that as Facebook use has become increasingly common among parents and grandparents, teens and tweens are ditching the social media site in order to escape their lame older relatives and authority figures. Sarah Buhr, however, disputes this.

"Ello is not the second-coming of Facebook, and Facebook users are not leaving the social network giant in droves," she writes. "How do I know this? Those with a shiny new Ello profile are posting about it on Facebook." She goes on to criticize Ello for what she perceives as its shortcomings. "[Ello] doesn't currently have the built-in stickiness that other sites have to keep a community coming back. … The features list actually looks pretty cool. However, most of it isn't built or doesn't work well. The search feature should be Ello's highest priority, especially with [its recent, highly publicized] growth. Ello's UI is pretty janky and makes this feature hard to find. The search option doesn't work, and the site just offers you a bunch of people to follow without any context on why you should follow them. ... There's also a glaring privacy problem that could leave the drag community and others vulnerable to Internet bullies as well ... [and another potential threat that is] the possibility of impersonation."

Those threats point to why Facebook implemented its legal-name policy in the first place. "Cyber-bullying" and identity theft are huge problems online. A legal-name policy helps reduce the risks of both, or at least makes users more accountable. These facts were lost in the hand-wringing over how any site's management could be so callous as to tell members of the alphabet-soup special-interests-social-justice-LGBTXYZ community that they couldn't simply pretend to be anybody they wanted to be. Interestingly, Facebook chose to "solve" the problem by telling those with special interests that they could post under pseudonyms, while people who just want to keep their legal IDs private presumably don't have the same option if they lack a differently fabulous sexual orientation with which to bolster that desire.

All this arguing over social networking comes at a time when some users are choosing simply to leave ALL of these sites completely. JD Gershbein called Facebook "a major component of the digital connective tissue that holds a growing percentage of the world together." While he wasn't wrong, that "connective tissue," of late, has a disease. That disease is rampant, hysterical political correctness, characterized by howls of outrage whenever a special-interest group decides it is offended.

It is no wonder, then, when some members, disgusted with the constant arguing and weary of the throbbing drumbeat of liberal bellyaching, just walk away. There is no way to argue with social-justice agitators, whose hysteria is matched only by their love for politically correct fascism. As with so much leftist whining, turning our backs on it – and them – may be the only long-term solution.

Media wishing to interview Phil Elmore, please contact [email protected].