According to the EFF, Facebook's policy allowing only "real names" for Facebook accounts has hurt Native Americans with traditional names like Robin Kills The Enemy or Shane Creepingbear, who have been getting messages like this:
It's often noted that Facebook's policy makes some Western assumptions around what constitutes a real name, and for reasons that are too obvious and painful to mention, it's uniquely ironic when that policy hurts Native Americans. Reports the EFF:
Lone Hill isn’t the only Native person who has been affected. As Aura Bogado at Colorlines points out: "The company appears to have been questioning certain Native users since at least 2009,when it deactivated Parmelee Kills The Enemy’s account. More recently, on Indigenous Peoples’ Day, Facebook deleted a number of Native accounts." She’s referring to the takedown of Shane Creepingbear’s account. These takedowns illustrate the continued problems with Facebook’s policy. As we pointed out last year, Facebook would be much better off if it simply stopped requiring verification of names at all. But if it won’t commit to doing that, there are still other steps it could take.
As longtime NWN readers know, this Facebook policy has also impacted members of the transgender community (though the company is now trying to make amends), and people using virtual world names for their Facebook accounts. Speaking of which, I have a partial update there:
According to an insider, it may be possible for at least some Facebook users to officially go by their virtual world name, though the process to do that is a bit complicated -- will explain more in a future post.
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Yeah a friend of mine was told to change his last name because it was just an initial.
For anyone keeping up with the debate over pseudonym and real life identities like the twitter debate, I would say this is more tricky. Given that Twitter allows for more flexible naming, people's truer and alternative names are easier to use so thus an easier way of dealing with the real person. For Facebook they want legal names, while legal and real names overlap for most people, this isn't the case for many trans* folk and, here, Native Americans. Real identities don't have to match up to real names, but that doesn't mean they are a pseudonym.
Posted by: Kitty Revolver | Tuesday, February 17, 2015 at 02:04 PM
there should be a "" around the last real.
Posted by: Kitty Revolver | Tuesday, February 17, 2015 at 02:05 PM