This morning I found out from my Facebook news feed that Facebooks you must use your real name policy has now started forcing some of my American friends with Hawaiian and Native American names to not use their legal names on Facebook. These names are on their birth certificates. Many of these folks have had to abbreviate their actual names just to continue using Facebook. The natural language processing algorithms being used here have flagged these names as fake. Facebook then has the nerve to tell these folks, Facebook is a community where people use their real identities. We require everyone everyone to provide their full name so you always know who you are connecting with. Their accounts got suspended and the letter was displayed when the person logged into Facebook after the suspension. Wow. I dont think there is any other way to be more offensive about the names of ethnically diverse non-mainstream people. First the person is suddenly locked out of their Facebook account, then the person is told that their name isnt really their name (with the implication that it isnt even a human name) and then an implication is made that the person is being fake, misleading and untrustworthy. I really would like to send a message to the computational linguists at Facebook. From one computational linguist to another, please consider the following. 1. A name is a social construct. It doesnt exist in the physical world and cannot be measured for physical realness. The Facebook product is a computer system that is also a social construct. If you measure the Facebook product in the physical world, it is a bunch of electromagnetic signals and fields active inside electronic storage and transmission media around the world. Facebook, as a product, is not tangible and neither is a human name. Moreover, a name can be defined in whatever way an individual wants, no matter what their birth certificate actually says. I can see the need to go by a birth certificate name in order to ensure identities are not stolen or to make sure that dangerous or criminal people can be tracked. But people using their actual birth certificate names are still being targeted by this use your real name project, so what really has been accomplished? 2. A birth certificate name is a full and legal name, even if it doesnt fall into a particular Facebook employees conventional cultural expectations of a name. A birth certificate name is a legal construct (and legal constructs are also social constructs). If it is really that important to acquire a legal name, then just send a message to every Facebook user to provide legal documentation to prove that their Facebook name is their legal name. Every single user should be asked to do this, not just those who have names that a particularly ignorant Facebook employee thinks as not falling under the arbitrary definition of a possible legal name. 3. The vast majority of the Facebook user community cannot be reasonably thought of as portraying their real identities. When it comes to most people on Facebook who use their real names (apparently defined by Facebook in this context as mainstream-culture names), the point of their Facebook profiles is usually to curate a carefully crafted fake image of themselves to their social world. Very few people on Facebook are real and accurately portraying themselves. It is bizarre to start insisting on realness in this community now, when the whole premise of most of the user behavior over the past decade is to indulge in personal public-relations reputation management (which some people consider pretentious, while others would call this an example of fakery). For the minority of users (which I like to think includes me) who are not interested in indulgently promoting a fake personality with their real names, there is a certain tolerance of this Facebook fakery and self-promotion because Facebook is still a fun, useful and powerful tool to interact with people, keep up with friends, share ones life with the world and learn new things through ones social network. Even with all the fake self-portrayals of people using their real names, there is still so much any user can learn about the human condition through Facebook, as long as sensible and effective efforts are made to protect them from dangerous and unethical people. This project was not one of those efforts when we see the result of what was implemented. It was not a sensible approach and has ended up offending several people from many diverse heritages. There is much room for improvement here. 4. If we limit ourselves to just talking about America, there is all sorts of controversial social commentary when we consider people with popular American names having a lower probability of having their Facebook accounts locked before receiving a ethnically offensive letter, while people from Hawaiian, Native American and other diverse backgrounds will end up having a higher probability of their account being locked before getting that offensive letter. I worry about how this poorly designed project will play out in other countries, which have completely different ethnic distributions, histories and social contexts. 5. People with ethnically diverse legal names who actually do want to be real on Facebook are now effectively being being asked not to be real on Facebook and are being given a different definition of what Facebook thinks is real when it comes to their own names. A persons name is a strong part of their identity, both to themselves and to their social network. Facebook ends up being dismissive about this strong part of a persons identity because of a poorly designed algorithm. The hypocrisy that can be perceived by Facebooks users here is astounding. The public-relations disaster is quite clear. I feel so much more motivated to make sure mistakes like this dont happen on products I work on. I hope Facebook is similarly motivated after reading this post.
Posted on: Sat, 13 Sep 2014 22:25:53 +0000
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