By John Mack Freeman
Over the last few weeks, tensions have been mounting between the drag community and Facebook. We even reported about it here. Basically, Facebook has a policy that all individuals using a personal account have to use their real name. Drag queens, by and large, have been using their stage personas on personal pages, running accounts from the point of view of their characters. Facebook has been killing off these pages by either deleting them or forcing the performers to place their given names as main names and their stage names as aliases. This has put a lot of people up in arms. The arguments mainly fall into a few main areas:
- Most people know drag queens by their stage persona and not their given name. This can lead to confusion in finding people and it can disrupt connections.
- Picture tagging is going to become a nightmare.
- People who are drag queens don’t necessarily want everyone in their real life Facebook network to know about this, lest they become targets of abuse and harassment.
These are all perfectly understandable. And drag queens have existed on Facebook for years unmolested despite the fact that Facebook’s policy has long been clear on the subject. So part of the blame in this kerfuffle lies with Facebook: if they more diligently assessed users on their site, they wouldn’t have to go through periodic purges like this. On the other hand, I don’t think that the drag queens really have a stiletto to stand on.
Facebook is not a right. Facebook is not a public platform. It’s a publicly traded company responsible to shareholders. And those shareholders care about profit. Anyone using Facebook for free should probably realize by now that they are not the customer; they are the product that is sold to the real customers. The real customers are the businesses who want you to advertise to you through sponsored posts and pleas to like their pages.
Drag queens, like any other professional entertainer, are welcome to avail themselves of the professional pages available through Facebook. However, the amount of reach and interaction that these pages can have with fans is severely limited without payment. And that’s where the real argument truly lies. For Facebook to work as an advertising medium for drag queens, it has now become cost prohibitive to many. So the drag queens can try their best to make connections, but in the end, if they want to put their posts in front of people, it’s going to be pay to play.
Facebook has nothing to lose by making this change. The few people who might leave the service will be overtaken by an ever expanding influx of new users from around the world. And those that stay and choose to buy ads will only help line the company’s coffers. Facebook is making the best decision for its business, and once people get done moaning in this moment, they’ll move past it and keep consuming like they always have in the past.
Don’t get me wrong: I love drag queens. I love independent performers of all stripes. I work in marketing libraries, and I realize what an enormous necessary evil Facebook is. And I hate that this hassle is happening to people that have to deal with this instead of coming up with even cooler new acts. But I also recognize that Facebook was never intended to be a public commons for anyone and everyone to make connections however they want. It was sold to users that way, but in the end, it has always been about advertising. Facebook owes none of us anything, so when they do something self-interested on their own platform that harms us, we have only ourselves to blame.
This is an opinion piece that reflect the views of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the GLBTRT, its membership, GLBT News, or its contributors.
“Anyone using Facebook for free should probably realize by now that they are not the customer; they are the product” says it all.