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Facebook eases up on real name policy

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Chris Cox, chief product officer of Facebook has apologised for its "real name" policy.The apology comes after the social media giant was caught off guard by a backlash from San Francisco's drag community where several prominent members were locked out of their accounts for not going by their legal names.In a statement on his page Cox said Facebook will update its policy which will enable users to identify themselves by their preferred names. He added that Facebook’s policy has never been to require everyone on Facebook to use their legal name but rather that users use “the authentic name they use in real life.”Cox said that this is the right policy for Facebook because it's part of what made Facebook unique from the rest of the internet communtiies where “pseudonymity, anonymity, or often random names were the social norm.”Just earlier this week, Facebook launched a new advertising service called Atlas that it positions as a “people based” advertising tool aimed at allowing marketers to reach “real people”.“Cookies don’t work on mobile, are becoming less accurate in demographic targeting and can’t easily or accurately measure the customer purchase funnel across browsers and devices or into the offline world. People-based marketing solves these problems,” it said.“All that said, we see through this event that there's lots of room for improvement in the reporting and enforcement mechanisms, tools for understanding who's real and who's not, and the customer service for anyone who's affected,” said Cox.

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