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.
Is the founder of FB protestant, or maybe the leadership? Does vkontakte, a foreign company, in a country with no protestant culture offer less restrictive naming policies?
Characterizing the issue as one caused (and the inference is only protestant Anglo culture would cause) this kind of names requirement is disconnected from reality. Companies in non Anglo and non protestant places have similar and even more restrictive policies. And also this idea of names is not an Anglo concept, as it was characterized.
[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/good-men-project/why-its-so-ha...