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The Single Vigilante Behind Facebook's 'Real Name' Crackdown
Molly McHugh sends this story from Daily Dot:
When Facebook issued an apology this week for suspending user accounts that had what it alleged to be fake names, it pinned the whole debacle on one person. This "individual," Facebook reasoned, sewed confusion into its flawed reporting system—intended to protect against bullying and online abuse. Facebook Chief Product Officer Chris Cox explains that Facebook was caught “off guard” by a lone actor who reported “several hundred” accounts as fake. According to our source, who claims to have spent "hours and hours" systematically reporting Facebook users from the drag community and beyond, thousands of accounts were suspended—and they've been at it for weeks. ... Given the timing and the accounts suspended, they believe that they are in fact the mystery "individual" who threw a wrench into Facebook's system, noted in Facebook's explanation of the events. "Considering the hours and hours I spent reporting accounts over the course of the past month, it is likely that I am."
From the article:
"Oh no I'm very serious. Spent most of my time at work past 3 days reporting Queens."
Considering I spend my Friday midnight completing shellshock patches to keep this planet running ... Can we start firing people who are useless to the world in general?
I don't see what this person could have to gain from this other than just being a dickhead. Heaven forbid someone be different from what your approved normal is. What a pathetic jerk.
If applying your own laws is "throwing a wrench" perhaps your laws are the problem?
The problem is not this guy nor Facebook's rules, but that the rules were enforced in a biased manner. This will always be a problem with only enforcing a rule after a report, because unpopular groups or individuals will be reported more often than the majority.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
What's troubling is the fact that no one at Facebook contemplated the possibility that this policy would be used as a form of bullying. Their aribtrarily-enforced rules about nudity are routinely used the same way by homophobes, who go around reporting innocuous photos (and even illustrations) of partial male nudity or even just gay couples kissing or showing affection, causing headaches, suspensions, and even bans of gay people from the site. And they do so with complete impunity because they can do so anonymously, and there is no penalty for false reports. The users who are reported are given no right to challenge their accusers (or even know who they are), and effectively no right to appeal. Facebook's own policies and procedures facilitate and empower this kind of harassment and abuse. And they're just now noticing?
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It is facebook's pointless, unfair, side-effect prone, and essentially pinheaded "real name" policy that is the problem. Without the policy, the problem would not exist (and people who would have otherwise not had to reveal their real names could be a lot safer on the site.)
But that's the nature of the beast. They're selling you to advertisers, and they can do whatever they want with you. Any idea you had about the site being about you is laughably off-base. What it is, is bait for you. They'll do what they need to do to attain and maintain critical mass for their actual customers (advertisers), and not one thing more.
The citizens are, by and large, far too dimwitted to move to a network where they *are* the focus. And so it goes.
The problem is, in fact, with Facebook's rules. Facebook did not recognize that a class of persons, that they would have been better off providing protection for, strongly identified with a name other than their legal name.
The rules were not enforced in a biased manner, but in a blind manner.
What you want is a compensatory bias to be applied after a report. That's not unbiased enforcement.