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Facebook Communications Social Networks The Internet

Facebook's Absurd Pseudonym Purgatory 290

Posted by Soulskill from the how-not-to-encourage-discussion dept.
An anonymous reader sends a story from a writer whose Facebook account was locked because somebody reported it as using a pseudonym. It doesn't, but Facebook demands a look at identification documents before releasing control over the account. Anyone whose name doesn't sound "real" to Facebook is at risk for this, and the social network doesn't even have a consistent stance on what an "authentic" name is. "Aside from the complexity of identity, the policy is haphazardly enforced at best. At worst, it’s dangerous and discriminatory, and has demonstrably and repeatedly been used to target people who often already are marginalized and vulnerable." Matt Cagle, attorney for the ACLU, says, "By controlling the identity of the speaker with this policy, Facebook has the effect of both reducing speech and eliminating speakers from the platform altogether. This is a particularly concerning move to the ACLU because forums like Facebook serve as the modern-day equivalent of the public square for a lot of communities.
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Facebook's Absurd Pseudonym Purgatory More

Facebook's Absurd Pseudonym Purgatory

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  • Do not... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by fustakrakich ( 1673220 ) on Saturday June 20, 2015 @05:58PM (#49953445) Journal

    I repeat, do not treat a private service as a public square. That's a horrible idea.

    • But facebook wants to become one. If they could decide, there wouldn't be any news websites, every story would be shared over facebook.
      Having private companies providing a public service works quite well at many places. Take media and twitter as example. At other places (broadband ISPs in the US) it sucks like hell.

    • Re:Do not... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by taustin ( 171655 ) on Saturday June 20, 2015 @07:13PM (#49953793) Homepage Journal

      It is not a binary equation. There are other categories in between. And there are a lot of examples of restrictions within that spectrum. And Facebook is probably violating some of them, if the allegations are true. It has, for instance, been illegal for 50+ years to discriminate on the basis of religion, race, etc. If your name doesn't sound "authentic" because you are from, say, an African tribe (I mean, really, if Johnathon Goodluck weren't the president of a country, how many Americans would believe that was a real name? Thus, making him, but not people with names like John Smith or Joe Jones, provide documents that can easily be used for identity theft, because he is from Africa and doesn't have a white sounding name, has been illegal for half a century.

      There's also the matter of whether or not Facebook (realizes) they are responsible for any misuse those identity documents are put to. It's only a matter of time before some disgruntled insider sells the whole database to some Russian mafia type.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Z00L00K ( 682162 )

      Facebook is a pool of exhibitionists that don't care if they are tracked by a large number of commercial interests trying to figure out where they shall market their stuff. The reason why it's 'free' is because you are the merchandise they sell - and everything you 'like' at a vendor is one more thing that adds to the pool.

    • I repeat, do not treat a private service as a public square. That's a horrible idea.

      He says on Dice's private service.

    • I repeat, do not treat a private service as a public square. That's a horrible idea.

      In a society based on private ownership, it's not something you can avoid. When every space people gather in is owned by a private entity, you either treat them as public or accept that you can't put your soapbox anywhere - and that means destruction. Powers That Be want to preserve status quo because they are the status quo, so they will simply ignore any problems until they grow to the point of tearing society apart.

      Democ

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Facebook is sooo yesterday anyways, no halfway interesting community would ever use it as public square...

      But I agree, it is an extremely bad idea, albeit one Facebook surely loves, as it will force more users into their service.

  • turkeydance. i identify as a bird.

  • Facebook ignorance. (Score:2, Insightful)

    by geekmux ( 1040042 )

    "...forums like Facebook serve as the modern-day equivalent of the public square for a lot of communities."

    Is there a way to identify these communities? Just trying to avoid areas of mass stupidity where Facebook somehow supplanted actual news outlets.

    Those who feel Facebook is in the position of being a modern day times square have obviously never heard of a troll before.

    Enjoy.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by shubus ( 1382007 )

      "...forums like Facebook serve as the modern-day equivalent of the public square for a lot of communities."

      Is there a way to identify these communities? Just trying to avoid areas of mass stupidity where Facebook somehow supplanted actual news outlets.

      Those who feel Facebook is in the position of being a modern day times square have obviously never heard of a troll before.

      Enjoy.

      I solved the Facebook problem by finally getting off it. Glad I did so.

  • I use one (Score:4, Interesting)

    by future assassin ( 639396 ) on Saturday June 20, 2015 @06:18PM (#49953551)

    and have it tied to my business account. One thing I discovered Facebook and Especially Google are usless for anything business related with out paying up the ass for likes. Only reason I got a G+ account that I update once in a while is that it lists me higher than the other local businesses in search.

    Probably in the next few months I'll abandon both of them usage wise and just keep them for search indexing.

    • Man, why does everyone have to charge businesses for things. It's like they are all trying to run a business or something.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by cfalcon ( 779563 )

        The problem is when a business comes into a space, "embraces and extends" the standard, and makes themselves the gatekeepers of something they have no business having a fucking fence around in the first place.

        A business charges for services or goods or something, someone who takes all your shit and charges you to use it is something else entirely.

        • I say that same speech every time I'm kicked out of a store for using the bathroom without buying anything first.

      • I'm running a business.

        I've used Google AdWords before (when it was affordable - 8-10 years ago I paid $0.10-0.20 per click where maybe one in 100 got me a sale, but a sale was worth about $400 to me, and would often result in repeat business). It was worth it, got me quite some business. A good investment.

        Now I'm running a tourism business, and clicks will cost me $1.00-2.00 each - offer lower and I'm not even listed on the tenth page of search results. Maybe 1 in 100 gets me a sale, and a sale is worth ab

  • I'm sorry for not using my full name here (Score:4, Funny)

    by TeknoHog ( 164938 ) on Saturday June 20, 2015 @06:18PM (#49953553) Homepage Journal
    It's actually Professor Tekno A. Hogg, M.Pupp. (Cantab). Now that you know my full name, I'm sure you will take my opinions much more seriously, because free speech is all about who says something, not what is actually being discussed.

  • Ahh.. Public Square - the phrase to use when trying to coerce someone into doing something you want.

    It's a dumb policy. Don't use Facebook. If people don't care they'll use Facebook anyway. Problem solves itself.

    • Re:Public Square (Score:4, Insightful)

      by sgage ( 109086 ) on Saturday June 20, 2015 @06:33PM (#49953607)

      Yes. No one is forcing anyone to use Facebook, so don't! And as much as they would like to be a 'Public Square', or a utility, they are not. FB is Zuckerberg's joke on humanity.

    • Tienanman, Times, Red, and Trafalgar are Public Squares that come to mind, although Cleveland has the exact namesake. [wikipedia.org] The Facebook has become the gathering place of the masses, whether or not we participate or condone the condition.

      As their de facto monopoly on popular opinion increases, it will become more efficient to cater to the masses through this venue unless a viable competitor is developed.

      Verifying identities is very much to the advantage of a company who sells its members personal information.

      • Right. And real identities are what brought the people to Facebook in the first place. First as students in selected colleges. People replicated their real live social networks on Facebook. It gave them the ability to communicate with all their friends and acquaintances at once. Previous to that the only way was with mass emails, and that sucked.

        After colleges it spread out through workplaces and other real life groups. People joining largely because they began to realise that their friends were communicat

  • They should probably just switch to a policy where an account requires a credit card, or valid ID, and you only allow one private and one public account per person.

    -Z

    • That would let a competitor in for all the kids or adults that either can't, don't want to or can't be bothered to fulfil those requirements. And require extra staff for the ID checking.

  • This policy is ridiculous (Score:5, Interesting)

    by jonsmirl ( 114798 ) on Saturday June 20, 2015 @06:31PM (#49953601) Homepage

    I have two Facebook accounts, a real one with with my real info and another one I just use for playing games. I don't want to mix 'friends' from casual games in with my real friends. I used a pseudonym on the second account. Facebook just locked my second account this week and wouldn't release it until I sent in a photo of my driver's license. I consider that a huge invasion of privacy. I had be using the second account for a long time under the pseudonym. After receiving my driver's license they changed the name on the account to my real name (now no one in the games knows who I am) and they entered all of the data from driver's license into the profile. This is just a total mess which is going to cause me to use Facebook even less than I do now.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      You gave some random website a photocopy of your driver's license. I feel sorry for you.

      • Pretty much this.

        I had ordered something over the internet from a company I had previously turned some trade with , and this latest transaction initiated a request for some photo ID to go with the bank card. Or. You can pay with Paypal.

        I believe it's statistically safer to use Umbrella Corporations like Amazon and Paypal, than to leave too much info in too many different hands.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

          Pretty much this.

          I had ordered something over the internet from a company I had previously turned some trade with , and this latest transaction initiated a request for some photo ID to go with the bank card. Or. You can pay with Paypal.

          I believe it's statistically safer to use Umbrella Corporations like Amazon and Paypal, than to leave too much info in too many different hands.

          This happened to me too - I was about to comply and send off the request when I realized at the last minute that not only was the in

  • Why not celebrities, too? (Score:3)

    by msobkow ( 48369 ) on Saturday June 20, 2015 @06:43PM (#49953661) Homepage Journal

    Fair is fair -- why are celebrities allowed to go by their stage names?

    • Because Facebook has a lot more to gain from them being there under their stage names than not being there.

      Besides celebrities are there with Pages in their stage names. The account used to set the page up is probably under the real name of the person they hired to do their social media.

    • I have seen so many names that are totally unlikely to be real.

      How about names like "Mercy Grace Cee Ogoy" (used to be Gray Cee Riggs until half year or so ago - name of the account changed, also an indicator of pseudonym use) or "FragiLe HEart" (capitalisation as used on Facebook).

      Facebook doesn't seem to really care.

  • At the risk of getting downvoted into oblivion... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Roger Wilcox ( 776904 ) on Saturday June 20, 2015 @06:44PM (#49953669)

    Who the fuck cares about Facebook?

    Facebook is a despicable company that doesn't have even a basic level of respect for its users. This has been readily apparent to anyone who has been willing to look for the better part of a decade. You want to be a part of that? Go right ahead. Just don't act all indignant when they arbitrarily lock your account or sell the data they have on you to corporations or the government.

    Furthermore, likening Facebook to a public square is just silly. Public squares don't fight for your clicks by targeting you with advertisements. Public squares won't track every move you make on the Internet after you leave. And, most relevant of all, public squares are places where it's perfectly acceptable to remain anonymous through the use of any pseudonym you can dream up.

    I say let Facebook do whatever they want. The more egregious the abuse, the more likely another clueless user will wake up and boycott that shit.

    • Who the fuck cares about Facebook?

      Hey! Don't badmouth my self-updating list of contacts.

    • Who the fuck cares about Facebook?

      All of the people who use it. And that's a lot of people. Let them do whatever they want? That affects a lot of people. Fail to sound the alarm? Then how do you differentiate you vs. the enemy?

      Knowing, but not warning, that makes you feel superior? What about knowing and warning?

      I say tell everyone you know, and let them decide. I would prefer to let them wrestle in Jell-O, but time is short and I have other priorities.

      But if you have links to Jell-O wrestling where

      • You know that the most efficient way of telling everyone you know is on Facebook, right? You could do it in 5 minutes, then not have to worry about it again.

    • Who the fuck cares about Facebook?

      Like this is going to get you modded down on Slashdot.

      The better question to ask is "Who on Faceback gives a damn about Slashdot --- or even knows that it exists?"

      The problem isn't unique to the geek forums: almost no one on the net makes the effort to open channels of communication with those outside their own group.

      • The problem isn't unique to the geek forums: almost no one on the net makes the effort to open channels of communication with those outside their own group.

        It's true if you look at CNC forums and 3D printer forums. The same things keep getting re-invented all the time on both sides.

    • Clearly you haven't been modded into oblivion, but honestly, this is a dumb question. That's like asking, "Who the fuck cares about Google?"

      Literally over a billion people care. And the advertisers care. And the shareholders care. There're a lot of people that care about Facebook.

      Whether you like it or not, and whether you use it or not, to many people, Facebook is becoming all they know of the internet. For all intents and purposes, it IS the internet for a segment of the population. There are mobile providers that will sell you a plan that gives you virtually no data for free, but you DO get Facebook access for free. Facebook's Messenger chat service has something like 700 million users and is the single most popular chat application in the USA. We hear stories about the NYT doing a deal for instant loading articles and a share of ad revenue because Facebook is also becoming the place where most people read their news.

      So yeah, LOTS of people care. YOU should care, even if you don't use it, because it's becoming the sort of behemoth that warps space around it. I hardly use Google's services at all anymore, but I definitely care about what Google is doing in the world. Most people with PCs and Android phones care about Apple and the influence it brings to hardware and mobile—even if they purport to hate every single change Apple brings to hardware or mobile. People that don't live in the USA definitely care what the USA is up to. There are plenty of reasons to care about Facebook and even weird things like this because they really do serve to show us the state of the internet today and give us hints to the future, or at the very least, what we DON'T want the future to look like.

      People have been threatening to abandon Facebook for various minor transgressions every year that it's been around, and it keeps getting bigger. It's not going anywhere for a while.

      • Right. It's not going anywhere for a while. And there's nothing that the open source community can do to change that. Because the FOSS community can only do what they always do: copy, whilst leaving out important bits and making the rest more complicated.

        In this case, the vary fact of anonymity destroys the very purpose of a FB type social network. It's all about mirroring real life social networks on the computer, thus making communication with people you know easier. No one wants a FB with anonymous peopl

    • Facebook users are the commodity. never forget that. They sell your data to marketing companies and make a pretty penny doing it. They just want to make sure their data is as accurate as possible.
  • People are stupid enough to comply with them when they request documents too. Seriously. I'm pretty sure my dog can live without a facebook account if the account she currently lends me is ever closed.

  • My Facebook name is "Dick Gazinya" and it has been such since 2006. Please don't report me.

  • Facebook is a place where most of the people you encounter have a real-world persona that pretty much matches their online persona, so if you take care to know the people you friend, it cuts out a lot of bad behavior. You have the opportunity, though you can also screw it up with poor choices of friends, to have a community that avoids much of the trouble of random corners of the internet. People are *much* better behaved when their real-world friends and acquaintances can see them.

    This is useful. It doesn'

  • Nobody is not a valid email address (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Pfhorrest ( 545131 ) on Saturday June 20, 2015 @07:46PM (#49953937) Homepage Journal

    I have an email username "nobody" at one of my own domains that I use for things that I don't want connected to me. It's a perfectly functional normal email account just like the ones I actually use, it just happens to be named "nobody".

    When I was forced to sign up for a Facebook account for a development project that integrated with Facebook, I signed up using that email address. Facebook refused with a message that was tantamount to "ha ha no but really, what's your email address?" Fuckers, that IS a real fucking email address...

    • I have an email username "nobody" at one of my own domains that I use for things that I don't want connected to me. It's a perfectly functional normal email account just like the ones I actually use, it just happens to be named "nobody".

      When I was forced to sign up for a Facebook account for a development project that integrated with Facebook, I signed up using that email address. Facebook refused with a message that was tantamount to "ha ha no but really, what's your email address?" Fuckers, that IS a real fucking email address...

      They don't want a *functioning* email address, they want an email address connected to you.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by antdude ( 79039 )

      What about other services beside Facebook?

  • Fake ID (Score:4, Interesting)

    by currently_awake ( 1248758 ) on Saturday June 20, 2015 @08:19PM (#49954051)
    So what happens if you send them a (poor) scan of fake ID? You're not impersonating a real person, and you're not interacting with the government, so I don't see any actual legal consequences of this. Do any lawyers out there have any idea on this?

  • Nads N. Nads (Score:5, Informative)

    by dcollins ( 135727 ) on Saturday June 20, 2015 @09:05PM (#49954277) Homepage

    The writer, Nadia Drake (as listed in the byline at Wired.com), doesn't explicate until almost the end of the article: it's not that FB is misinterpreting her actual name as overly exotic, nor is she using a stage or business name, but her account is registered as "Nads N. Nads". She justifies this by saying that her friends commonly call her "Nads" for short and that she also wants to avoid a stalker. That might be justified, but the fact that she buries it near the end of the article, after a whole bunch of support for actual minority and Native American names, makes it feel just a bit self-serving. I would argue that proper journalistic practice would be to front-load this information in the first or second paragraph.

  • Seen It Happen (Score:3)

    by maz2331 ( 1104901 ) on Saturday June 20, 2015 @11:10PM (#49954667)

    I know someone who's real first name is "Fantasy" and FB wouldn't let her register an account. She had to change it to "Fantasie" instead to get past it.

  • This is a serious issue for many Native Americans and has been repeatedly "Facebooked" about over and over with little to no effect. Because many Native Americans do not have European names they get their accounts locked out. This is easily exploited by those who actively engage in harming Native Americans and others they do not like because of race.

  • ... because Facebook's members waive damned near every right that is on any books anywhere.

    The only right we have is to leave.

  • Too bad people are forced to use Facebook. If they were free to leave then this wouldn't be an issue.

    Oh wait.

  • For the life of me, I don't see why this is suddenly a controversy. So far as I can recall, Facebook has had the "real names" policy the entire time they've been around; all the way back to when they were "The Facebook" and were exclusive to college students. And they've never hidden the policy. In fact, they used to advertise it as a feature to distinguish themselves from the cesspool of fake accounts and trolling that MySpace had degenerated into. The people whining about it now remind me of those peo

  • Like everyone else here, I don't want to give Facebook my real information. So when I set up a Facebook page for my business and it demanded a personal account to link to that business, I just made something up. I don't care if they ban / lock my personal account. Or all of my personal Facebook accounts, those mean squat to me, but what happens to my business page if that happens? Does anyone know for sure what happens in that case?

  • Simple Solution (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Gavagai80 ( 1275204 ) on Sunday June 21, 2015 @02:13AM (#49955071) Homepage

    Mark pseudonym accounts as such. Put the name in a different color of whatever you need to do. That way people who want to use it anonymously don't inconvenience those who want to know who people are.

  • The solution is simple: do not use Facebook.

    Facebook is evil.

    Two very important reasons never to use Facebook:

    * Facebook blatantly states in their EULA that they will sell your private information to third parties. In fact, anything you upload becomes their (intellectual) property.
    * Facebook does not let you use pseudonyms. Your privacy is your own and it should be up to you to decide whether or not you use your real name and not to some billion dollar company whose primary goal in your participation is to

  • Anonymous Coward got locked out of Facebook ... twice!
  • ... because the name facebook doesn't sound real to me.

  • Most news sites use Facebook for posting comments. The country I live in is into a lot of political turmoil right now and not only is my name unique but muy workplace lists me very fondly, so anyone wishing to find me and break my face could do it.
    We all know about the teams whose job is to swing political opinion by means of fake accounts with real sounding names. It would seem like nothing is being done against those. On the other hand, many of my friends have fiddled with their screen names and pictures

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

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