Facebook has a well known “real names” policy, but what if your name turns out to be a bit too real for Facebook?
Take the experience of Isis Anchalee, a San Francisco-based engineer, also known for kicking off the #ILookLikeAnEngineer campaign earlier this year that promoted women in STEM.
On Tuesday, she wrote on Twitter that Facebook had closed her account. Anchalee suggested the reason was because her first name is the same as the shorthand for the Islamic State — ISIS — the group responsible for the recent Paris attacks, among other atrocities.
Although she later tweeted that she’d been able to get back into her page, the issue remains: How can Facebook keep a grip on offensive language or criminal groups using the site, but also respect that names like Isis have been around for centuries — as in, since ancient Egypt — and have only recently been co-opted by extremists?
If you think Anchalee has it bad, spare a thought for Australian-Vietnamese man, Phuc Dat Bich. Don’t get it? Say it phonetically in American English. There you go. (In Vietnamese, it’s pronounced Phoo Dat Bic, according to this very helpful YouTube video.)
In January, Phuc Dat Bich posted on Facebook that his account had been shut down by the social media network multiple times.
“I find it highly irritating the fact that nobody seems to believe me when I say that my full legal name is how you see it,” he wrote, alongside a photo of his passport. “I’ve been accused of using a false and misleading name of which I find very offensive.”
In response to the controversy over LGBT names in late 2014, Facebook’s Chief Product Officer Chris Cox apologised but said the real names policy is “the primary mechanism” the company has to protect users from impersonation and trolling by people hiding behind fake monikers.
While people such as Isis likely use Facebook in the way the company intends, however, people with names as typical as John Doe regularly wield it as a mechanism of abuse. The solution? It should be about how you use Facebook, not your name.
As Lux Alptraum noted on The Verge earlier this year, “‘real names’ are a clumsy metric.” In Germany, a regulator ruled in July the company cannot stop people from using aliases as it violates their privacy.
“Monitoring behavior, rather than names, seems like a much more useful strategy,” Alptraum wrote. “[Facebook] should be able to devise a better system to determine who’s just setting up a fake account to troll, abuse, or misrepresent.”
“Facebook is a community where people use their authentic identities,” Facebook says on its website. “We require people to provide the name they use in real life.”
If that’s how the company want the platform to function, Facebook is going to have to get a lot better at making sure their algorithms don’t unfairly penalise people whose names don’t fit in with the Anglo-standard.
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Source: Mashable