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."

Comments

Re:What an asshole

[lgw]

What's a "real name"? The name that you insist everyone calls you would be my definition. "Don't call me by my government"

Real name policies are BS anyhow - very Western Firstname Lastname centric, ignorant of cultures where the only unique name for someone is the list of all the names they're known by (which, as you might imagine, makes printed phone books less than useful).

One of the great truisms of software development is that there's no universal way to break down a persons name into components, and people get really pissed when you get their name wrong.

Re:What an asshole

[FireFury03]

As for myself, I'll be happy once the world learns to build systems that don't break on the apostrophe in my last name. I still come across plenty of systems that don't, and every time I am tempted to go "Johnny Tables" on their ass.

I'm still waiting for computer systems that can handle my address, which has a y with a circumflex in it... I frequently get letters and packages arrive that has "ŷ" printed on the address label! (Yes, even big international websites like Amazon, SagePay, etc. are incapable of using a valid UTF-8 character... In fact ISTR SagePay's API only supports ISO8859.