Facebook's Name Policy Strikes Again, This Time at Native Americans | Hacker News Reader

Facebook's Name Policy Strikes Again, This Time at Native Americans

eff.org

This is really racist though. Like... imagine the insult of being told, "Please use your real name..." when you already are. Motive on the policy aside, Facebook devs were REALLY racist when they coded this check and flagged people who have "descriptive names" -- they clearly don't have any native friends and couldn't care less about how their 2 lines of code would make someone feel that day. Some form of formal apology is probably in order.

You're right, and in an interesting way. This is a great illustration of how irrelevant intent is to systemic racism. The devs weren't intentionally racist in their name check code, but their ignorance - the stuff they didn't know they don't know - led to a very racist policy. Good intentions are not sufficient for eradication of systemic racism.

Edit - it appears the name check wasn't formalized into actual code, but rather policy.

Ignorance about names doesn't support an accusation of any kind of prejudice, much less racial (not cultural) prejudice. I am glad EFF knows better than to misuse a word that would have people stop taking them seriously due to gratuitous KKK/Nazi undertones.

To define identity in such a way that it rejects something as fundamental to a culture as names is certainly racist against that culture. I'm curious what you would call it instead. I'm sure you can understand on your own why saying something is racist is not literally the same as comparing it to the KKK/Nazis, so I won't delve further into that topic.

There is no word for prejudice against a culture because we don't have the same consensus that's axiomatically evil. And if we did the developers would not be guilty of it. The policy is insensitive, capricious, heavy-handed, and stupid, but it's not driven by developers' opinions about native american bloodlines or even names. Calling it "racism" is an accusation of a uniquely dangerous kind of malevolent prejudice.

The developers are not racist. My entire original point is their attitudes and intents were irrelevant. The system they created is very much racist, completely independent about how they felt in creating it; I'm not sure how you can really dispute that. The venerable Jay Smooth describes a closely-related distinction here[0]. Also, when you describe a system as racist that's somewhat different from describing a person as racist, which might be a place we're talking past each other.

Re: the culture/race/ethnicity terminology quagmire, the sister comment by dragonwriter explains it well.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0Ti-gkJiXc

There is no distinct word for prejudice against a culture, because ethnicities (which are cultures) and races (which are culturally imposed constructs, though they are portrayed as biological distinctions) are often treated interchangeably, so prejudice against cultures (especially in the form of ethnicity) are generally described as racism. For instance anti-Hispanic bigotry is usually described as racism, though "Hispanic" describes an ethnicity -- that is, a culture -- not a race.

I'm surprised "Lone Hill" would even register. "Hill" is a perfectly ordinary European name, and "Lone" can be short for "Magdelone", or "Lonetta" or a lot of other things. It's nothing like "Sitting Bull" or "Kicking Bird" or "Crazy Horse".

A few years ago I decided to phase out my pseudonymous Alec Schueler username and begin using my painfully common real name (John Hill) on certain websites. Quora in particular refused to accept it, and asked me to prove that this was in fact a real name. Instead, I decided to add them to my host file and haven't used their services in the 3 years since.

I had a pretty strong emotional reaction to this policy. I can imagine it would be pretty distressing to run into this problem as e.g. a Native American or transgender person.

"Lone" is also the 13th most common name for females in Denmark.

Source: http://dst.dk/en/Statistik/emner/navne/navne-i-hele-befolkni...

She didn't get locked out until she changed her name from her father's to her mother's. It seemed pretty obvious to me that she got flagged because she changed her name after eight years of Facebook use, not because of what she changed it to. She wonders why white people with hippie name accounts don't get shut down, the obvious answer is, they do all the time and she just doesn't know about it. And they typically don't get shut down unless the account does something suspicious, or someone reports it.

My actual, factual Chinese name, which I use in Chinese-speaking countries, was automatically disallowed by a bot within a second after I tried to add it to my Facebook profile. Oddly, my son's Chinese name (the same surname, but a given name that arguably looks a little more authentically Chinese) has been posted on his Facebook profile for years. Why Facebook can't figure out that I am Chinese by marriage (and now by parentage) and have spoken the language for most of my life (which I have declared on my profile from the beginning) is beyond me. I have no idea how to get behind the bot response to reach an actual human being to add this information to my profile.

If you managed to get in before they upgrade the guards at the gate then you're in, otherwise you're stuck outside.

Change of policy over time turns what was possible in the past to "no longer acceptable" today.

Keep in mind that you have no right and no control over anything in the facebook world and you can explain every quirks.

People (and programmers) have many false beliefs. Combine this with a strong desire to automate things and reduce recourse to properly trained humans and you end up with a particular form of tyranny - as we see here.

I'm surprised no one's linked to the below posts already.

http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-b...

http://infiniteundo.com/post/25326999628/falsehoods-programm...

heh...

> (#11) People’s names are all mapped in Unicode code points.

Well, not really sure how to fix that one!. Maybe one day postgres will be able to index a column of handwritten images, but until then I think I'll just stick with being 99% ok.

A little frustrated that both the current top-level comments here seem to reflect someone not reading the article before commenting.

Frankly, a name I would have reported a while back would have been "Mark Zuckerberg."

"Hey Facebook, I am SURE this Mark guy made up that last name. I am POSITIVE!"

What is the benefit of a real name policy in the first place? Isn't it still fairly easy to create fake accounts using generic names?

They are less concerned with fake accounts with fake names than they are with real accounts with fake names. Real accounts with fake names are potentially good data that they can sell, but with reduced quality because of the fake name.

The "real name" policy is entirely about raising the perceived value of their dataset.

But you can live on Facebook as (fake name) John Crito and connect to all for friends and FB will let you. But Laughing Critter will get shut down.

If facebook becomes aware that John Crito is not my real name, they would ban me or make me change it. They would only "tolerate" that fake name for as long as they did not know it was fake.

They ban names like Laughing Critter, despite being real names, because they incorrectly believe that they are fake names.

They're not working with perfect information here. Their strategies have false positive and false negative rates, which they seemingly consider acceptable (hence the outrage. If you can make facebook reevaluate the cost of a false positive (by associating those false positives with outrage), then you may be able to influence facebooks behavior).

I know humour isn't always well received on HN, but this article about Facebook's "authentic name" policy reminded me about a recent-ish Onion sketch:

http://www.theonion.com/video/cias-facebook-program-dramatic...

I imagine there must be a monetary reason around this dumb policy, considering they must have seen the backlash around G+ and still thought "we'll risk it". Do advertisers pay more to know someone's legal name or something?

FWIW, just tried registering with "Mark Sugarmountain" and got "We require everyone to use their real name on Facebook. If you'd like to add an alternate name, you may do so after registration. Learn more."

Facebook should have just stuck with the original policy or not have one at all.

Real name policies are a bad idea, but fixing the problems with using real names is not, though it sometimes can be difficult.

I have an account I do not use on Facebook with a completely made up name from a MMORPG I used to play and they have never said a thing to me about it. I can't believe they want to harass Native Americans about their names.

The issue is more that these "real name" policies tend to indirectly target groups rarely encountered by the sort of people who work at social network companies. If you don't have any trans, Native American, or [insert group that often changes names/has uncommon names] friends, you might not see a need to use caution in applying these policies.

One could even say that it reeks of hubris to believe a largely homogenous group of people is fit to police the values and customs of the entire world.

Something something twitter activists.

If you RTFA, it isn't even Facebook harassing NA users. It sounds like this sort of review is triggered by a complaint, so it's really unidentified people using FB's shitty process to harass minorities.

Deleted comment

Facebook's decision to police the names of their users wasn't a technical one. And the EFF article provides a number of compromise suggestions that would allow Facebook to keep their name policy while reducing the damage it does.

The article also suggests that Facebook's enforcement of the name policy isn't consistent with an algorithm but with manual reports. People are using this policy as a tool of harassment. Facebook needs to end it.

"but surely the mistake is a bug in some automatic algorithm"

Not quite, from the article: "Some background: Facebook doesn’t police names itself. It relies on reports from other users."

How about simply letting people use whatever name they want?

The kneejerk response is it reduces the financial value of your data they sell to others.

However, upon reflection, I think that is incorrect. If someone wants to be called "Dana Lone Hill", because that is her name, maybe her marketing spam should call her "Dana Lone Hill", even if facebook thinks its made up or racists don't like her kind and see this as a highly effective harassment technique.

Database columns are cheap. I like going by my initials. Not seeing this as a major technological limitation in 2015.

Marketing spam that is using a name that the recipient invented for use on facebook will immediately be discarded, since using the pseudonym outs it as not legitimate.

It is in the interest of spammers to use the most official name for a person that is possible, since mail that is addressed in such a way is read (unless it has another "tell").

The last paragraph debunks your diagnosis pretty thoroughly.

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