October 9, 2014 by Ian P. Beacock

Silicon Valley’s Empathy Problem

Facebook is no stranger to controversy, but last month the company found itself in a public scrap with its fiercest opponents yet. The cause? Facebook’s decision to delete the accounts of several San Francisco drag queens, enforcing a longstanding policy that users go by their real names on the site.

Here in San Francisco, the activist queens known as the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence reacted with anger and disbelief. As queens like Sister Roma rightly pointed out, alternative names are a means of greater safety, especially for those in the LGBT community. After all, we live in a country where you can be fired for being gay, a nation in which queer people are regularly disowned and taunted and bullied and beaten. Sometimes it’s unsafe to share everything with everyone.

Although Facebook has since apologized to the queens, the controversial rules haven’t changed. We shouldn’t be surprised by the company’s stance. “You have one identity,” its chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, declared several years ago. “Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.”

Comments and policies like those betray a stunning lack of imagination. They presume that the world is a static, simple place where identities are not questioned but assured. The assumption behind Facebook’s “real name” policy is that everyone feels (or should feel) certain about who they are. Maybe that rings true for the handful of young developers running the social network in Menlo Park, Calif., but it doesn’t reflect the 21st-century world most Facebook users actually know and experience.

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Continua qui: http://chronicle.com/blogs/conversation/2014/10/09/silicon-valleys-empathy-problem/