Global coalition tells Facebook to kill its Real Names policy

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The 21st century’s definition of a “complete fucking waste of time” is Facebook.

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Hey, remember a little over a year ago when Facebook “apologized” for the suspension of drag queen accounts because of the “real name” policy?

Facebook’s chief product officer Chris Cox even said, “Our policy has never been to require everyone on Facebook to use their legal name. The spirit of our policy is that everyone on Facebook uses the authentic name they use in real life.”

Let me emphasize that was over a year ago.

Then again it was only a few months later that Native Americans protested Facebook’s policy and were joined by drag queens and other transgender people who were apparently still having problems.

Since Facebook employees have admitted the policy is horribly flawed and badly implemented shouldn’t they stop treating users as guilty until proven innocent, even temporarily, while they try to come up with something better?

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I can’t like this enough! One hip young teacher thought that I’m a dinosaur because I’ve never created a Facebook account. She also feels that she doesn’t know a lot about me since she can’t bother herself to ask, “How was your weekend?” She taught two classrooms down the hall from me, for Christ’s sake.

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I wonder if using a fake ID to “prove” one’s desired identity to Facebook is considered a crime.

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If you really want the points, your fake ID needs to read “Donald Duck” or somesuch.

Why don’t these groups of anonymous types male their own social media site?

Then you get all the problems associated with getting others to actually use that site.

Lots of various platforms out there. The code and the servers are the easiest part. Luring the users off what they are used to is where the difficulties are.

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But what about the real Donald Duck?

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I thought the Real Names idea was to make it tougher to be a troll or stalker. Harder to throw abuse from an account with you name attached.

Maybe it was a flawed tactic, I don’t think it was done maliciously.

I think google pulled that justification out for putting real names on youtube (it turned out it actually make the driving trollies worse, not better). For both google+ and Facebook, though, the point of real names is that they are selling an identity service. Remember, you aren’t the customer, you are the product. Information about you isn’t nearly as useful if they don’t know who you are.

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I thought this anonymous thingy was a global phenomenon will millions of adherents?

Yep. We are the circus.

It’s hard to get people to change their habits. Once you manage to form it, you can keep cashing on it for considerable time. There is an inertia in such things.

On the other hand, the “I don’t want to use it but I’m using it because others use it” situation is only metastable and prone to fairly spectacular cascade failures.

They are the circus. I’d say we are the clowns.

If you can pass this note to your hip teacher two classrooms down:

If you want to know how a person’s weekend was, ask them.

:slight_smile:

I’m a dinosaur too.

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I confused media for ground. My apologies.

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