Facebook Investigating Accounts With Short Names Like Au?

One day not long ago, blogger and Facebook friend Erik Gordon Bainbridge got an odd message in Facebook, apparently from Facebook, asking whether Wagner James Au was a real life name. (See screencapture on side.) Since we both blog about Second Life, at first he wondered if this was a crackdown on avatar names, which would be expected if odd, since my Facebook name is the one I use in the real not the virtual world, but here's the even stranger thing: This is apparently part of Facebook's effort, as Bainbridge blogs, to go after illegitimate accounts with extremely short names. Strange, because I probably have almost as many Facebook friends with short surnames (say Su, Wu, Ma, along with assorted Aus) as extremely quirky avatar pseudonyms. Adding to the mystery, not long after getting that message from Facebook, Bainbridge tells me the message plain disappeared:

"It's gone," he tells me. "I've looked twice, once this morning and again after getting this message. I can't find any trace of it. It's not in my messages list or anywhere else I've looked. I even tried going back in the history of both computers I've been working on today, but can't find it." So all I'm left with is an unsettling if unconfirmed sense that going by my actual identity might not be enough to satisfy Facebook that I'm really real. So I put the query to folks named Ng or Ip or maybe even Le and Xu - have your Facebook friends got a message from Facebook, asking if you're real?

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Comments

[Iggy]

It's just insane and a bit ethnocentric. How many John Smiths get this "treatment"?

One wonders what would happen to the hypothetical FB profiles of actor Rip Torn or NASCAR driver Dick Trickle if they were not famous.

[Apollo Manga]

Organizations can get obsessive about this sort of thing. This month's Smithsonian magazine mentions that in 1996, AOL's obscenity filter blocked new accounts for people living in the English town of Scunthorpe because of the banned word within the town's name!

[Archangel Mortenwold]

Police state bullshit at its "finest", and a chief reason why Facebook's management should all be fired and replaced with people who respect privacy.

[Pussycat Catnap]

Thank goodness there's nothing in my name that would trigger such a filter as Apollo mentions.
...
What?

I would say this -IS- going to end up being ethnocentric against Asians. Chinese names, and the names of people from countries that anytime in the last 5000 years were occupied by China - tend to follow a pattern. Surnames that descend out of a Chinese language are monosyllabic. Chinese / Korean naming tends to be 3 syllable: family generation personal.

So everyone in Family 'A' has the name: A[.][.]
Traditionally all the kids of Mr and Ms. A will be: A B [.] - male and female. Only the last part would change. This tradition is mostly gone now, but the surnames and the three syllables largely hold; especially in Korea.

1/5th of Korea has the surname 'Kim' - I could see someone not aware of this insisting it was a fake name since, among Anglos, that's a girl's first name.

Foolishness to be so obsessed over names... especially in a global community...

[Arcadia Codesmith]

A Second-Life friend of mine got her avatar account taken away a few days ago, and her surname was nine characters. It's just another pogrom against the pseudonymanous.

Zuck Markerberg.

[Adeon Writer]

Facebook is currently requring a scanned color copy of a government-issued ID if I want my Facebook account reactivated. I was at the same time instructed that I am NOT to simply make a new account. My Facebook name was Adeon Writer.

[foneco zuzu]

Fu.... Facebook, by GOD's sake how many times i have to say i did beta test if for more then a Year and why i don't even have an active account since that time!

[Dartagan Shepherd]

My first question would be whether Au is your birth name or a pen name or a name you legally changed to by choice. If one of the latter then they were actually correct in identifying a name that wasn't "real" (yes, I know that pen names are legitimate).

None of my business of course, but you see my point.

There are instances of legitimate short last birth-names, but on the flip side if there are an abundance of false short last names, then it is actually something they need to action on.

Regardless of my personal Facebook feelings, it's their show to set the rules on, and it's a real-life persona kind of place. It's their right as a company to try to enforce that and catch false entries until someone changes their mind or changes legislation about online identities and privacy.

[Hamlet Au]

Au is my actual birth name, yes. It's a relatively common Chinese surname. The other two I mentioned, Wu and Ng, are much more common surnames, probably used by over 50 million people. Ironically, Facebook has been trying to get into the China market. Not a good sign.

[shockwave yareach]

A name like Au, I'd think would be golden :)

[Dartagan Shepherd]

@Hamlet Thanks for the clarification, felt kind of rude to bring it up, because it really isn't any of my business, as I said.

It does reinforce your point though about false positives with Facebook.

[Hamlet Au]

No offense taken at all, I know "Au" might seem like a pen name, especially if you're like Shockwave and thinking chemistry. :)

[Dave Bell]

I saw a news report, a few days ago suggesting that adverts on Facebook were almost useless. Most of the "likes" were coming from fake accounts, for values of "fake" that included fraudulent intent.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/07/13/bbc_facebook_bots/

[Doreen Garrigus]

I knew Au was your real name, but I've always been kind of tickled by the serendipity of the chemical symbol. Oh, to be born with a name cool enough to be a pseudonym. For a writer, that stuff's just gold.