Not trans but I identify with the letters "chx" much more strongly than my real name. There are thousands, perhaps ten of thousands of people out there who know me by this nick and nothing else. My own brother often calls me that. British Columbia doesn't allow me to take a single word as a legal name but once I get citizenship I am very seriously considering changing my legal name to a name where the abbreviation makes it a sort of retronym. (Charles Harry Xavier?)
I heard both :) not to mention the Hungarian pronunciation of c-h-x where I originally come from -- I am using this nick for more than twenty years and 1993-2005 I heard it only in Hungarian as my contact with the Western world was mostly virtual. Then everything changed at the first DrupalCon in Antwerp but I am getting off topic here.
How sad is it that the "protest" they come up with is to deactivate their accounts for a day?.
Facebook is terrible. Ditch it entirely. Or do like I do and leave up a bare bones page with a bit of contact information for old friends and never visit.
I'd really like for everyone to construct elaborate arbitrary but consistent identities.
It would make Facebook enormously fun as opposed to a large interconnected network of corporate brands and homogenized identities.
A communal reflection of the minds eye. The current perpetual thanksgiving dinner is fun but I'd rather talk about dreams. Exploration over documentation.
I just stopped caring about being invited to "events". If the event is so impersonal that it needs to be broadcast rather than two or three people organizing and then blasting a simple text message like "Hey beers at 5PM at <Insert Restaurant or Bar Here>. Come if you can!" I just don't care.
I definitely disagree with this. Facebook's utility for inviting people (even close friends) is huge to me. The messenger system is way better than text messaging, integrates well with its calendar and reminders, allows people to see who else is coming, doesn't cross platforms poorly (like group texts to Iphones + Android, in my experience), includes a map and permanent details, can be accessed online, ... etc, the list goes on a long way.
Or you could, say, call, text, and e-mail people you want to be in contact with. The idea that someone can be completely cut off from all their contacts just because they lose their Facebook account is absurd and reckless on the part of the user.
I didn't say anything about being completely cut off from all your contacts. I said, how will people remember to invite you to events, other than by your 5 closest friends who would jump through the hoops of - sending you an email? Or text message.
I don't mean as some theoretical exercise, I mean practically speaking. In fact, a lot of totally public events are only listed on Facebook anyway. The easiest thing to do is to invite people via FB. The bar is raised dramatically by making people send an unsolicited text message or email, if they even have your email address.
I just coordinated a meetup via email. Unbelievably awkward and high-friction.
It may be absurd, but it's not at all uncommon. Sending group invites via SMS is an incredibly kludgy experience, and following the path of least resistance, is so unrealistic when you have Facebook events at your fingertips. All of your friends are already there, and you merely need to change the details, and Facebook handles all the communication.
I guess this is the work of a bunch of trans-haters abusing the report feature.
Assigning the right amount of power for an automatic filter is a science itself, though. Heuristic AV scanners and spam filters suffer from the same issues.
For example even big telco providers (Ay Yildiz Germany) get caught up for now MONTHS in Gmails spam filter with no way to change this. Their emails are discarded already at SMTP delivery...
I don't know Native American names, but I guess the filter classifies their names as having too much entropy when compared to the other 1.1bn FB users.
1.1bn gives a pretty exhaustive list of common names for a given country region.
Well, its a known problem and their continued foolishness is a pain to people including those who do not work for Facebook but have to deal with ticked people because they are the local computer person.
> 1.1bn gives a pretty exhaustive list of common names for a given country region.
If the last name is a person with a Wikipedia entry then their pretty exhaustive list is not very exhaustive.
> Cynics will tell you that using your “real name” is so they can sell your details to advertisers. That’s not the case.
Facebook is selling access to their profile of a person for targeted ads and tracking across the web - which includes a real name. No, I haven't worked at FB, but I get the business side from a Product Management perspective.
Yes, ad impressions can factor into it, but one could argue that there would be more engagement using a name that a person is currently using or known by, resulting in increased time on the newsfeed, not less.
It's all about a story to sell advertisers though. Facebook is an advertising platform. We use "real names" is just a marketing bullet FB can hold up to advertisers in glossy material and sales pitches.
Real name policies are indeed a made up solution mistakenly used by some to address trolling issues as well. The thing is, that argument has been proven false, time and time again.
Ello, that underdog social community, is proving right now that pseudonymity can work.
I guess the real question is, "Are we willing to walk the talk and support the companies that are standing up for users on this issue as well as privacy?"
Of course we might have to sacrifice some features we are used to, but ultimately it's the only way to send a message that will be heard.
Google, afterall didn't change it's stand on real names just out of some epiphany or random act of kindness. That story is a little more complex for sure, yet our eyes and where they spend time is the ultimate metric in today's ad model.
”I guess the real question is, "Are we willing to walk the talk and support the companies that are standing up for users on this issue as well as privacy?"“
An interesting question.
So on one hand we see that we have some kinds of companies that can provide useful global services (facebook, google, wikipedia, sourceforge (before ads), mozilla, github, etc), but it is impractical, unsavory or counter productive to make "users" pay (because we're not only passive "users", but active contributors to the services facilitated by those companies.
The "solution" found by those companies is to extract the needed money from other companies in exchange for advertisement.
On the other hand, we can print money to give to banksters only to satisfies their shareholders, and with no benefit whatsoever to the general population, on the contrary.
What if, instead, we printed money to give to those internet companies and associations providing useful services? They wouldn't then have to use advertisements, and therefore could better protect the privacy of the users/contributors.
An interesting proposition, but since so much of the online (even offline) world is ad driven these days (or rushing to be), there would be too many businesses wanting a piece of that action which might contribute to an shortage of ink :) (figuratively speaking).
Could Facebook implement a PageRank type algorithm that gets people with already verified real names (perhaps they paid for something by credit card on FB, or are registered with a .edu email that matches their initials), to then say whether their friends name was real? Surely there's a way of proving someone's real name without making them use their legal name.
I wonder if they simply want the legal name. If part of the purpose of Facebook is to sell networks of people to marketers, then being able to tie your network identity to your home loan, car loan, and credit score is going to be very appealing.
Is the use of WASP in this case wholly inappropriate and clearly intended to be derogatory? Why is it tolerated and not considered a form of hate speech?
Personally, I did not read that as inciting violence or discrimination against my whitebread self. So I don't think it's hate speech.
I think, as Wikipedia says [1], "The term applies to a group believed to control disproportionate social, political, and financial power in the United States. It describes a group whose family wealth, education, status, and elite connections allow them a degree of privilege held by few others. [...] When the term appears in writing, it usually indicates the author's disapproval of the group's excessive power in society."
It seems like a legitimate label here. Our notion of what a "proper" name looks like comes out of that cultural tradition. And as one of our own notes, that notion is often painfully wrong. [2]
However, many other traditions are much more restrictive regarding personal names[1]. Some countries require the names to be gender specific. So blaming protestants from the British isles (and their American relations) is quite misplaced and inaccurate.
You seem to be arguing with something nobody said. There's no assertion that WASPs are the only people in the world to have ever decided that one sort of naming convention is normal.
What is being said is that our particular notion of names comes out of that WASP tradition. (Which, if you'll take 30 seconds to read Wikipedia, has important class and wealth connotations.) And therefore it doesn't apply perfectly to an extremely diverse society of immigrants, one with a long history of cultural, religious, and social experimentation.
It's an accident of history that a dominant strain in our culture is "protestants from the British isles". But it's still a pretty important accident. It leaves a mark. We still call that part of the country "New England", for example.
Forget what the article says, about some people not even being allowed to use their own names — what's really important here is that we not write anything that remotely sounds like blaming white people.
Amen. Even as a white guy I'm getting tired of Fragile Whiteness Syndrome [1]. Just pointing in the direction of the source of the standards that Facebook is enforcing and we're suddenly off to the races.
You can blame Germans and French if you like. It would be accurate, in some contexts. But blaming protestant Anglos here is factually incorrect. Would you rather they further misinformation and mischaracterize people and history just because they feel like it?
I have no idea why you keep going on about various other countries' naming laws, when the passage in question wasn't even talking about enforcement at all:
> Facebook likes to think of names as a one-to-one mapping. You have one name, and that name is how people refer to you at all times. It’s a very WASP notion of how names work, and the reality is far more complex.
Facebook, as an American company, inherited its ideas about names from mainstream American (i.e., WASP) culture. This was a poor choice, because those ideas do not also cover how some other cultures treat names. That's all this is saying. Your interpretation of this as "inflammatory" and "mischaracterizing history" is frankly baffling.
"Facebook likes to think of names as a one-to-one mapping. You have one name, and that name is how people refer to you at all times. It’s a very WASP notion of how names work, and the reality is far more complex."
Nope. Not inappropriate. Not derogatory. Not hate speech. Different cultures treat names different ways. Here, "WASP" is a reference to the dominant American culture. I didn't bat an eye when I read it.
To me, "WASP" has a pretty narrow definition, with strong East Coast and British affinities. I'm largely Irish by heritage, and so of course there's some Catholic in there too. So, while I'm white, I'm (mostly) not Anglo-Saxon or Protestant.
In fact, ironically, one of the characteristically WASPy things that comes to mind immediately is the prevalence of unusual names -- "Leslie" as a man's name; "Van" as a legit first name; people with three or four middle names; whole lines of firstborn men with the same formal name leading to ubiquitous uses of nicknames, etc.
My point is, the term WASP is used here not as an enpowerment, but as a target of blame for the subject matter. If WASP is a reference to dominant American culture, why not just say dominant American culture? White Anglo Saxon Protestants are in no way responsible for Facebook's naming schemes. Maybe it isn't offensive to you, but it is unquestionably slang, and I would add yes, offensive, because it's a) not true, b) out of context, and most significantly c) in direct contrast with the article's call for understanding of other cultural identities.
I personally don't see a big contradiction between calling for a more diverse understanding while pointing out that what is nominally "normal" is part of a very specific dominant cultural segment.
And given that the term originated among sociologists, some of them WASPs themselves, I think calling it "unquestionably slang" is strong. Ditto "offensive". If you're offended, you can just say, "I'm offended" without trying to cast it as some sort of false objectivity.
It's certainly used to be inflammatory and simultaneously denigrate the people it's supposed to represent. It's, sadly, wrong. Anglo protestants are not the ones who brought about the concept of one to one name mapping, nor the most vigorous about insisting upon proscribed names.
One can go over to nominally catholic and gaellic France and find much more state control over accepted personal names[1] A name new to France has to be proven to exist, if its not an indigenous name in France. The are other countries with similar control over names some of which require names to be gender specific and unambiguous, in that respect.
White Anglo-Saxon Protestants are not the inventors of names nor does it seem like that group in particular is radically defensive of how naming works.
I'm not sure it is hate speech, but it was meant to cast negativity on one group.
So, "Zip" used to work there and she hasn't used her connections to get this resolved? While it's unfortunate that this happened, that's pretty standard in this situation. Make a call - it sounds like she knows the right people.
Summary: Facebook has an overly rigid process governing names and this guy has an edge-case problem.
Is this not a solved issue? How do women who change their name upon marriage use Facebook? Does Facebook recognize legal name changes? Is that not in effect here?
It says something that my comment is getting downvoted, though I'm not sure what. Is it sensitivity to saying scenarios that are statistical anomalies "edge-cases"?