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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?
In the Gamer community this person would be known as a griefer, they enjoy nothing more than ruining things for others and while spend as many hours if not more doing so.
CAPTCHA: offends
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?
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
yes. exactly. so why does anyone put up with this stinking pile?
they have network effects
so whats the first thing you should do as a queen, a statist, a racist, a leftist, a druggie,
a libertarian, or any other kind of self-proclaimed individual
tell them to fuck straight off. say hello to your neighbor. i mean the actual piece of flesh
that sleeps 50 yards away from you at night.
their trillions are based on nothing else than the fact that you feel compelled to post
shit on their website. dont complain about their policies...just stop using it altogether
stop using the internet and have breakfast at your local diner. or use dragbook.com.
or make dragbook.com
google, facebook, twitter, linkedin - they haven't done anything for you. a bunch of
highly paid assholes trying to figure out how to exploit you
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.
Facebook "users" are a product being sold. Real names allow Facebook to better monetize their user database by enabling correlation with other big data vendors like Acxiom. Once they have a complete profile of who you are and the entire details of your life, it is much easier to implement targeted ads. Fake names are useless for making them money.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
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.
I'm truly sorry you chose to make that post anonymously. Spot on, and amusing at the same time. I would have enjoyed making sure I took special note of future postings if I knew who you were. Well, kudos anyway. :)
The rush to "do" underlies a great deal of our problems from incompatible OS upgrades, bugs left behind to fester, the rug being yanked out from under previously working applications, and functionality going missing -- or crazy -- or sideways -- in existing user applications. There are methodologies that can resolve all of these things the vast majority of the time, but very few software developers at any level use them. Much harm results.
<RANT>
Primary among them, NEVER remove or change the stated design behavior of an existing function. If you have a better idea, add a new function with a new stated design behavior. Leave the previously existing one alone; if necessary, point out that it won't work with "new stuff", if indeed that is the case. Then stop. If an already existing function is not behaving as the stated design behavior says it should, change it until it does.
Pro tip: If "upgrading", if whatever "enhancements" you created make something stop working or degrades how it works in an existing application that used the function according to its stated design intent, it's about 1000000:1 that it's your fault AND that you shouldn't have done whatever you did.
It doesn't matter if you're an OS programmer, an application programmer, a PD library maintainer, or what. If and when you screw up existing stated design behavior, you have not created an "upgrade", you have created a "fuckyougrade" and somewhere, someone, or more likely many someones, are contemplating dragging you through a fire ant hill after dousing you with some other ant hill's characteristic pheromones.
</RANT>
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
There are people in Western culture who have problems too.
Like royals with only first names. Quite often a long row of them, but still no last name.
Then there are native Americans. Thoroughly Westernized, but with names like As The Owl Flies one risks being called "Mr. Flies", and get letters with "Hi, As"
Then there are systems that only allow a small subset of pre- and postfixes. They allow III but not IV, so those who have the same name as their father, grandfather and great-grandfather end up as Mr. Iv.
Personally, I've found that having a two word last name is enough to confuse many systems.
Then there are addresses. Contrary to what American programmers think, not everyone of the Western world has a street number.
In many places, if you live in a small town or in a well known building or farmstead, there is no street number.
The only sane thing to do is to let people enter their name and address the way that's correct for them. If you need to contact them, also have them fill in the correct forms of address. Then Sir William, Lord Pembroke can get his mail sent to Wilton House, Wilton, Salisbury SP2 0BJ, UK, and be addressed as "Pembroke" or "Montgomery".
And Teller won't get letters saying "Hi, Na" or "Dear No F. N. Teller".
Obviously the current system in which individuals with ideological axes to grind can negatively impact communities where people don't go by their legal names. However, it's not obvious what the right rule should be. Of course I think you should be able to use psuedonyms, nicknames, stage names etc.. etc.. on facebook but how do you deal with facebook identity theft.
So I have Jane Mary Tyler Doe. I go create a facebook account pretending to be her and, if she isn't a huge celebrity, it wouldn't be too hard to convince a large number of people (probably anyone not already friends with the real individual) that I'm really Jane Mary Tyler Doe. I can then use that account to make her look like a racist, ruin relationships with coworkers and potential employers etc.. etc... unless my fake account can be suspended quit quickly. Alright how can facebook do this.
1) A real names policy. True, this has all the bad consequences above but it allows them to immediately suspend accounts but isn't vulnerable to serious DOS type attacks since a since credit card transaction or the like can quickly confirm someone's legal name and prevent any false impersonation accusation from ever causing another suspension. Given the low probability that someone with the same name wants to engage in the impersonation facebook has enough human hours to evaluate these rare situations in reasonable detail.
But this undermines an essential purpose of facebook. To let people present themselves online to the same people they know offline meaning stage names, nicknames etc.. etc..
2) A no impersonation rule. Alright now someone asserts the account Jennifer Doe is impersonating her. What can facebook do? If the suspend the existing account things are even worse since instead of creating a fake account someone with ill-intent asserts that the current account holder is an imposter gets their account suspended and now controls the only account representing itself to be Jennifer Doe's. Given the size of facebook they simply can't stop anyone from creating any new account with that name and the impersonator could create an account Jen Doe.
The very fact that people are allowed to use names other than their legal names means there is no good heuristic to see who is likely the deliberate imposter. After all Jennifer Doe might be the name she goes by in school but the name on her birth certificate could well be Bertha Jennifer Doe and Jennifer might not even appear on things like credit cards meaning facebook doesn't even have a good guess as to the imposter.
Also this creates the possibility of a DOS attack against any account (keep claiming it is an imposter account from accounts). If facebook eventually stops viewing such imposter accusations as real then any imposter who gets their before the real user can simply launch a bunch of accusations of imposterization at themselves until they insulate themselves against any accusation from the person they are actually impostering (after all they can be a perfectly legit Jennifer Doe account then change their picture and other details later to impersonate a target).
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What they should do is basically implement a web of trust style infrastructure. Facebook can start occasionally asking people who frequently message or are listed as close friends whether the person they talked to or the person with that email address really went to school such and such. Also friend requests should include a couple of selected bits of public info (like email address and the like) which, would hopefully make impersonization more difficult.
Ultimately, however, facebook needs to have a attestation system akin to key signing. You get your close friends to attest that the person whose picture and details appear in the facebook account really controls the account. Details will be a pain in the ass but it's the only plausible way since impersonization is a matter of details like schools, pictures etc.. etc.. not real names and facebook just can't check those themselv
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
Personally, I've found that having a two word last name is enough to confuse many systems.
You should see the violence and mayhem that an individual with the name A O (first name A, last name O) wreaks upon an HMO patient data file system for which some long-departed pre-millenial programmer decided there should be a three-character minimum for the combined name field.
It always comes down to the same problem: If one is trying to be tolerant, how much intolerance can one tolerate?
The best way to show a flawed policy is to force them to actually enforce the policy. Too often we enabled flawed policies and rules to flounder because we ignore them or find ways around the policy. If you want to change the policy, enforce the policy. For too long, Facebook's real name policy has been indiscriminately enforced. Many users persist for years with obviously fake names, while other people feel the full force of the policy, usually those in discriminated groups. This happens all the time in real life, where enforcing agencies will selectively enforce policies or laws on targeted groups. Selective enforcement of the law can be illegal as it runs counter to the equal protection act and 14th amendment, and corporations need to be careful that they don't run afoul those in discriminatory business practices.