Facebook naming policy is horribly racist | Hacker News Reader

Facebook naming policy is horribly racist

imgur.com

5 pointsdbg314155 comments

I had a friend who asked me to help her mom get on Facebook.

My friend is having a baby and she wants her Mom to be able to follow along on Instagram or whatever.

The lady is Native American, and has a very Native American-sounding name. (She asked that I not give her real name, but it's similar to other names like "Kills Pretty Enemy" -- probably a bit less extreme that that even, maybe closer "Brown Otter".)

Anyway, I'm technical. I thought, "How hard could it be to get my friend's mom on Facebook?"

So after signing up it said basically, "Your account is in probation while we validate who you are." OK...

She told me that she had tried 3-4 times and had never gotten past that part.

And again I thought, "Nonsense, surely Facebook wouldn't deny someone the ability to sign up!"

But yeah fast forward a week, and here we are. This is what you see when you sign in.

https://imgur.com/a/Da3UQtv

This has been documented for almost 10 years at this point. If they wanted to "fix the bug" they would have. Safe to say Facebook is just racist at this point, yeah?

Telling people that they can't use their own names... that's so low. It's Facebook, and all the associated Meta products. Do this.

https://time.com/3710203/facebook-native-american-names/

A long time ago, my wife had to send a photo of her drivers license someone at Facebook to prove that indeed, she was using her real name. I don't know if that option is still available. What's even more funny is that her sister has been using an anagram of her (the sister's) name on Facebook, and has never had any trouble with it, even though it is completely fabricated.

Not “racism” exactly, I’d probably call it cultural insensitivity? Noninclusiveness?

Overusing that word doesn’t help the argument, and why I didn’t upvote this despite my inclination at first glance.

Maybe this could be salvaged with a newer post.

It's not racist. It's automated political correctness.

Facebook and Google are full automated Kafkaesque decisions. As long at it affects small percentage of people and don't affect the bottom line it's going to be like this.

I feel like as long as a decision them made impacts one group of people more than another group (especially when the impacted group is a historically marginalized group), that it's OK to call it racism.

If this were politically correct they would allow names from all cultures.

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